At the End of the Century

October 1, 2018
A career-spanning collection of stories about the collision of East and West.When Jhabvala (A Lovesong for India, 2012, etc.) died in 2013, she left behind a prodigious body of work that had garnered her a Booker Prize for Heat and Dust (1975) and Oscars for co-writing the screenplays to A Room with a View and Howards End. Born in Germany, educated in England, and married for more than 50 years to an Indian architect, Jhabvala described herself as a perpetual refugee, moving for much of her later life between New York's Upper East Side and India. The 17 short stories in this collection take us from the early 1960s through 2013, though in a way they all feel as if they belong to an earlier time: Westerners, bored with their imploding lives, latch on to the perceived exoticism of India. In one story, two rich sisters (one married to a pompous American businessman, the other sleeping with him) become infatuated with a young Indian screenwriter ("Pagans"). In another, an English secretary heads to India to devote herself to assisting a guru despite the fact that she has competition for his attention from a brash German devotee ("A Spiritual Call"). Sometimes, Jhabvala switches the dynamics, as when a wealthy Indian college student begins a disastrous affair with a mousy English lecturer ("A Course of English Studies"). Whatever the premise, Jhabvala is interested in binaries; poverty plays a foil to wealth, India to Europe, age to youth, family to the individual. Even more, she wants to explore the ways that characters are shaken out of their familiar lives by "too much and too violent a humanity."Despite the old-fashioned milieu these stories move in, they are compelling in their elegance and for Jhabvala's poised, precise eye, which stays consistent and steady through the decades.

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Starred review from November 1, 2018
A young German Jewish refugee in England in the 1940s, a resident of India for two dozen years, and a New Yorker from the mid-1970s until her death in 2013, Jhabvala triangulated her three adopted cultures in the 17 enthralling stories gathered in this sterling retrospective collection. This triad is also explored in the many startling m�nage-�-trois variations she dramatizes with lyric sensitivity and steely irony. In A Course of English Studies (1968), a blindly romantic Indian student attending university in England wreaks havoc on a professor's life. An Experience of India (1971) portrays an expat woman who precipitously wanders alone throughout India, open to any adventure, while the true parenthood of a girl of allegedly English and Indian descent is subtly acknowledged in A Choice of Heritage (2003). The author of 20 books with a Booker Prize and two Oscars (the latter, thanks to her screenplay work with the Merchant and Ivory producer-director duo), Jhabvala was a spellbinding short story writer of fluid empathy, exceptional cross-cultural insight, and abiding respect for unconventional love. Radiantly introduced by Anita Desai (The Artist of Disappearance, 2011), for whom Jhabvala was an essential mentor, this is a richly captivating, revelatory, and important collection.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)

Starred review from October 15, 2018

Jhabvala (1927-2013) is perhaps best known for collaborating with James Ivory and Ismail Merchant on their Oscar-winning films, but the German-born author also won the Booker Prize for Heat and Dust in 1975. This collection, which carries an introduction by novelist Anita Desai, offers 17 stories dating from 1963 to 2013. Jhabvala is renowned for her tales of life in India, but this collection also includes stories set in Europe and America. The characters in these "Western" pieces are mostly upper-class, artistic types in places such as New York and Los Angeles who seem pallid and interchangeable next to her more memorable Indian characters. The Indians portrayed in such stories as "Expiation" and "The Widow" are unforgettable. Jhabvala is especially observant on the lives of Westerners in India. Like Paul Scott in The Raj Quartet, Jhavbala reveals how certain Britons living in India slowly become unhinged owing to culture shock. Impressionable young women fall under the spell of a swami or, as in "An Experience of India," just fall apart. VERDICT Essential reading for anyone who enjoys fiction about India, especially when the stories come from the pen of a master.--Leslie Patterson, Rehoboth, MA

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