Cobalt Blue

June 6, 2016
In modern-day India, the Joshi family is split along generational lines: parents Aai and Baba value traditions and the home, while two of their children, Tanay and Anuja, seek more from their lives than marriage. Into this volatile mix comes a mysterious, alluring tenant who takes over the upstairs room. Both Tanay and Anuja fall in love with the man, who remains nameless throughout the novel. A soft-spoken artist, he has forsaken his last name and refuses to elaborate on his troubled past. The story is narrated first by Tanay and then by his sister, Anuja, as they recount the events leading up to Anuja’s running away with the man and her eventual return. In these combative siblings, Kundalkar has created two powerful, singular voices. Tanay is intimate and sensual, and his narrative lingers over precise moments, turning them over incessantly as he searches for meaning. Anuja’s introspection reflects her more focused personality and reveals her inner nature: rebellious, impulsive, and self-centered. As she gets over her heartache, Anuja wonders why her brother is not happier to see her return. Both siblings, in their own ways, try to reconcile the man they loved with his sudden desertion, and their own willingness to unquestioningly follow him. In his debut novel, Kundalkar combines two distinct and complementary voices to deliver a complex and intricate story about love, family, and making one’s own path.

June 1, 2016
A lodger causes fissures in the relationship between a brother and sister when both find themselves drawn to him in this atmospheric novel.The scope and setting of Kundalkar's novel are intentionally intimate and restrained: over the course of this short book, he establishes a comfortable domestic milieu and then introduces the element that will lead to its disruption. Each of the two main characters narrates approximately half of the novel: first, Tanay tells a story of his desire for the boarder who has come to live in his family's home in Pune, in western India. What follows in the second half is his sister Anuja's account, told in a diaristic fashion and providing a different perspective on the same events. Tanay addresses his portion of the novel to the unseen boarder, and each half of the novel meticulously establishes the presence of a fundamentally unknowable figure, an agent of change who offers the idealized promise of a different way of life. Throughout the novel, a claustrophobic sense of confinement and obligation battles it out with the prospect of something more freeing. But even that can come with its own flaws, both for those who opt to take it and those who are left behind. There are certain moments where the approach feels heavy-handed: in the English translation, the fact that one minor character, a lawyer, is named "Mr Dixit" borders on the allegorical. It's one of the few moments in this novel where the mood isn't understated. The strength of Kundalkar's work here is in how lived-in it feels--both the setting and the lives of its two protagonists. This novel neatly establishes an emotionally complex situation and presents its characters with difficult decisions to quiet but devastating effect.

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July 1, 2016
On the moody, spare pages of Kundalkar's novel, translated from the award-winning screenwriter and director's native Marathi, a brother and sister pine for the same man. In part one, Tanay speaks directly to his lover, the handsome and mysterious artist who had been renting a room in his parents' home, but who has since vanished. In the second half of the novel, Tanay's sister, Anuja, returns, disheveled, heartbroken, and near-crazed from an extended, unannounced trip, and we learn about her companion through her diary-like entries. Though we understand that the same man has deeply affected both siblings, and suspect this before either of them does, we learn about him much differently through each sibling's perspective. In nonlinear, memory-molded passages, Tanay and Anuja separately, and very much alone, question who this man really is, how they fell so deeply for him, and how they will move on. Through their stories, we learn about Tanay and Anuja's family, home, and society, too. Kundalkar's first novel available in English is a unique and subtle exploration of heartbreak that succeeds in its translation.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)