burnt sugar by avni doshi

the times literary supplement 18 september 2020

Avni Doshi’s first novel, Burnt Sugar, has a memorable opening: “I would be lying if I said my mother’s misery has never given me pleasure”. And its narrator, Antara, may be justified in this attitude, given that her mother later says to her, “I always knew that having you would ruin my life”. The novel has drawn praise – and gained a Booker Prize shortlisting – for its somewhat taboo exploration of being mothered and mothering. Antara is an artist in Pune; Tara is the mother, and she is losing her memory. Her daughter resents this because it means there is “no way to baste her in guilt” over the past. There is plenty Antara thinks her mother should feel guilty about: the period, for example, that they spent during her childhood living in an ashram and begging on the streets, before Antara was sent to a boarding school run by draconian nuns who made her hold her soiled bedsheets over her head in the gymnasium for everyone to see. Antara reflects, “the only reality that remains from that time are feelings and ideas, and whether I authored them or they were placed within me is impossible to know”.

This is important as some of Antara’s recollections are frankly surreal: “My earliest memory is of a giant in a pyramid … Around him are smaller pyramids, also white, and Ma is one of them”. These rather muddy and confusing passages are enlivened by points where Doshi’s prose turns on a dime. Antara describes the intimacy of one female friendship in adulthood, which initially sounds unremarkable: “Sometimes, when we are alone like this, Purvi interlaces her fingers through mine and swings our arms, like a little boy trying out his bat”. This almost immediately escalates to: “A year ago, at the Club, she fingered me in a bathroom stall while our husbands ordered drinks at the bar”. The rapid changes in tone can make Doshi’s writing riveting but, as the novel progresses, she capitulates too frequently to the urge to shock.

Doshi has said she was partly inspired by Sheila Heti’s autobiographical novel Motherhood (2018). And Burnt Sugar, in its emphasis on female bodily function, and particularly defecation, also resembles Heti’s How Should a Person Be? (2010): both Heti and Doshi display an urge to unprettify the reality of womanhood, casting a cold eye on it. Antara’s detachment from her own physicality begins in adolescence when she starts putting on weight, “taking up too much space, sucking the air out of closed areas … I had started to suspect that someone else was living in my body”. Doshi is good on the corporeal alienation that can sometimes accompany pregnancy. Antara, pregnant with her first baby, observes “the mound that is my stomach moving. It already doesn’t belong to me, this creature”. And later, “There are men I want to fuck. I know there were other uses for my body once, when my stomach was unmarked, my nipples uncracked”. Still, the description of her post-partum vagina as “like a crime scene” adds nothing new.

There is a distinct lack of hope in Burnt Sugar and the novel can sometimes feel needlessly depressing, as if born from that same urge to shock. In considering the act of mothering a baby, Doshi raises an interesting question: “Is the sensation of receiving a kiss less pleasurable than that of giving it?” She then takes it to its logical, brutal conclusion: “Maybe our mothers always create a lack in us, and our children continue to fulfil the prophecy”. The writer Leïla Slimani has said, “we are only going to be equal when people consider that women have as many flaws as men”. Doshi has not only run with the idea that women can show themselves to be “unpretty”, but that they can also be as corrosively cynical as men – including about motherhood.

This review first appeared in the Times Literary Supplement