3.5
The Space Between Us
ByPublisher Description
“This is a story intimately and compassionately told against the sensuous background of everyday life in Bombay.”—Washington Post Book World
“Bracingly honest.”—New York Times Book Review
The author of Bombay Time, If Today Be Sweet, and The Weight of Heaven, Thrity Umrigar is as adept and compelling in The Space Between Us—vividly capturing the social struggles of modern India in a luminous, addictively readable novel of honor, tradition, class, gender, and family. A portrayal of two women discovering an emotional rapport as they struggle against the confines of a rigid caste system, Umrigar’s captivating second novel echoes the timeless intensity of Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, and Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible—a quintessential triumph of modern literary fiction.
“Bracingly honest.”—New York Times Book Review
The author of Bombay Time, If Today Be Sweet, and The Weight of Heaven, Thrity Umrigar is as adept and compelling in The Space Between Us—vividly capturing the social struggles of modern India in a luminous, addictively readable novel of honor, tradition, class, gender, and family. A portrayal of two women discovering an emotional rapport as they struggle against the confines of a rigid caste system, Umrigar’s captivating second novel echoes the timeless intensity of Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, and Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible—a quintessential triumph of modern literary fiction.
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Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communitiesThe Space Between Us Reviews
3.5
“this book tells the story of two very different, yet equally interesting, women in mumbai. my home city btw!! despite living in the same city, only 15 minutes away from each other, they lead incredibly different lives, which i found the most interesting and frustrating.
sera, a middle-class parsi widow, employs bhima in her home and cares for her in some ways. however, at the root of it all, she still maintains that distance between them that makes it clear that she is upper class and bhima is not. i found this the most annoying part of her character to me. she seems to pride herself on how well she treats her workers, yet refuses to let them sit on her furniture, eat from the plates her family eats on etc. her excuse is that her late husband wouldn't like it... but like... he's not there to see it? she seems like she just wants to look like a good person to everyone else and thinks of herself as above others, even those within her class status, yet does very little to actually separate herself from everyone else she criticizes so much.
similarly, bhima is also very prideful. as a lower class woman living in the slums of mumbai, she frequently has passages in the book where she is looking down upon other workers in her mistress' building, calling them stupid or naive. at the same time, she seems to not recognise that these people she is judging are in a very similar position to her.
i went into this expecting it to be something of a story of friendship between these women, but found a very different book. i still enjoyed it very much though. a detail i particularly liked was how sera calls the city "bombay" whereas maya refers to it as "mumbai". this is such a specific detail that i think only really makes sense when you know the history / culture behind the name. this is just my interpretation, ive not actually seen anything about this so i could be entirely wrong on why this has been included. but bombay is the anglicized, colonial name for the city given by the british empire, and everyone i know now calls the city mumbai (being maharashtrian). i think this tiny language difference really shows us the class gap and how the upper class kind of distance themselves from the res for the city, also wanting to prove that they aren't the working people of the city. the name mumbai is associated with issues surrounding marathi identity, economic struggle and labour in modern-day india, whereas bombay is reflective of an upper class, elite life that sera lives.
overall, i liked this book and all it's little details and main themes it covered a lot. the only thing that annoyed me were the characters (although im pretty confident that was the point).”
“Ce roman pose la question de savoir s’il est possible d’aimer un pays quand on a honte de sa politique et de ses coutumes. Quelle forme cet amour prend-il ?
Le chant des cœurs rebelles est un livre profondément marquant quant à l’histoire qu’il raconte, celle de Meena mais aussi celle de milliers de femmes (et d’hommes) dans des pays comme l’Inde, qui perdent tout à cause de cette haine, de cette violence absurde de ceux qui rejettent les autres à cause des différences de religion.
J’ai pu voyager sans bouger de mon lit, en apprendre tellement sur un pays qui me semble si différent de celui où j’habite, et que j’ai envie de découvrir dans la vraie vie, malgré la colère que je ressens envers des gens comme Rupal, des gens que je crains de rencontrer en étant là bas.
Je conseille ce livre à n’importe qui, mais je préviens les âmes sensibles des horreurs que l’on rencontre lors de cette lecture. Je le recommande tout de même, car il est très important de s’ouvrir et de s’intéresser à ce qu’il se passe partout dans le monde.”BelievableDiverse representationMemorableMinor characters stand outMultilayeredOriginalSteady pacingWell-structuredBleakEvocative imageryGrittyHarshSetting fits the storyBeautifully-writtenDescriptiveOriginalAbuseDeathDomestic violenceGriefMisogynyReligious intoleranceSexual assaultSubstance abuseViolence
About Thrity Umrigar
Thrity Umrigar is the author of seven novels Everybody’s Son, The Story Hour, The World We Found, The Weight of Heaven, The Space Between Us, If Today Be Sweet, and Bombay Time; a memoir, First Darling of the Morning; and a children’s picture book, When I Carried You in My Belly. A former journalist, she was awarded a Nieman Fellowship to Harvard and was a finalist for the PEN Beyond Margins Award. A professor of English at Case Western Reserve University, she lives in Cleveland, Ohio.
Other books by Thrity Umrigar
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