Twists and turns down the road to love
Tulip Chowdhury returns with a new understanding of the heart
The Feast of Love comes with a delightful blend of different people trying to settle matters of the heart. This book is about men and women who are madly in love with life. For these people life seems to hold different meanings on each petal of a flower. The myriad characters etched in the book make the reading rich and profound. The diverse characters strewn in with deft skill are passionate and witty. Reading this book is like sailing gleefully on a calm sea and yet one has to be aware of the humour and crafty plots that play beneath the apparent calm waters. Each character tells his or her own story. Charles Baxter, an author (named after the writer himself), is in an emotional tangle and is unable to complete his novel. He decides to take a night walk. On his way he meets his old friend Bradely Smith. Bradely is out at night trying to find refuge from insomnia. Bradely runs a coffee shop called Jitters. He suggests that Charlie name his book The Feast of Love. Bradely has just completed a painting under this name and says that he is an expert on love. Since many kinds of people come to his coffee shop he volunteers to send in some people to tell Charlie about their lives. The narration of these people is what makes up a delightful assortment of diverse lives in the book. This extraordinary novel takes in great subjects of literature like love, death and life's bewildering mixture of pain and happiness. And yet they are approached in a very simple style. The lucid language makes the reading sheer delight. The story takes place in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Bradely speaks of his first wife Kathryn, who has left him for a woman named Jenny. It seems to him that his wife really never got to understand what he was made of. When she left him he had nothing to say to her. What could he say when after one year of married life she chooses her woman lover over him? In Bradely's words, There is Chole, a young woman working in Bradely's coffee shop. She goes around wearing a T-shirt with "RAGING HORMONES" written on the front. Her boyfriend Oscar is always high on drugs and yet both are inseparable. Their young love is sweet and touching. When they drive out Chole never sits in the back seat because she says, " Time goes slower in the backseat than the front because the front gets everywhere first." To Bradely's coffee shop comes the professor, Harry Ginsberg, Bradely's neighbour, and his wife Esther. They have a son who is mentally ill. The son, Aaron, lives in New York and once in a while gets in touch with his parents to accuse them of how they have ruined his life or to demand money. The husband and wife share the helplessness of the situation. As Harry says, " To have a son or daughter like this is to have a portion of the spirit shrivel and die, never to recover. You witness the lost soul of your child floating into the ethers of eternity. Ethics is a dream, and tenderness a daytime phantasm, lost when night comes. Esther and I hold each other until dawn breaks. We live in a large city, populated only by ourselves." Lydia the artist enters the scene. She is not exactly beautiful, but her eager smiling intelligence greets you and before very long you're divulging your small wickednesses to her, and she is telling you hers. She is the perfect hostess for a party. She writes and illustrates children's books, all of them about a family of goats given distinctive features like reading glasses, distinctive smirks, uncombed forelocks and scowls that Lydia has picked from her two ex-husbands. Bradely is comfortably settled down with Diana until a sudden storm blows and he is once again thrown into confusion about how the bonds of love work. Margaret enters his life and he sees another sparkling side of love, another individual who loves him like the gurgling water of a waterfall. Chole decides to marry Oscar, but her future father- in-law, the "Bat" as she calls him, is completely against it. The Bat and Chole never see eye to eye. As Chole says, " We have forty miles of bad roads always stretching out in front of us." There is life going on in Ann Arbor as if each actor is playing a part. Yet the ordinary people are caught in extraordinary events of life. The story is told from several points of view. The style is easy to read and is like a page turner. Through Bradely's coffee shop Charlie comes in touch with people who hold up colourful worlds of their own. It is as if he is looking at life through a kaleidoscope. The whole town seems to find a pulse of its own at the shop. As every character tells his or her own story, Baxter weaves each sharply distinctive voice into a chorus that is unforgettable in its comedy, wit and profundity, as well as in the sheer reading pleasure that it offers. Baxter, like an artist, has his story told while he remains in the background to be appreciated for his mastery with words. The voices of the characters resonate with each other, desperate people joined by the meanderings of love. The reader is taken up with the people who invite you to a world where you will smell, hear, feel and taste and your mind and emotion will be fully engaged. They come together in a tapestry that depicts the most irresistible arenas of life, that is, love and despair. Once you take up The Feast of Love to read you will not be able to put it down, it is as if you start breathing with the unforgettable characters drawn in it. A real miss if you do not get hold of it! Their voices resonate with each other--disparate people joined - Their voices resonate with each other--disparate people joined by the meanderings of love--and come together in a tapestry that depicts the most irresistible arena of leach other--disparate people joined by the meanderings of love--and come together in a tapestry that depicts the most irresistible arena of life.
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