The Clearing

Very proud about my mother having successfully obtained an M.A. in French. Her dissertation, based on the little I've gleaned from informal conversations with her about it over the phone, for I know no French, is a comparison between two feminist novels--`The Long Silence' by Shashi Deshpande which is written in English and `Le Voile de Draupadi' by Ananda Devi which is written in French. Very broadly speaking (defensive phrase to indicate that I can't/haven't read the dissertation), the thesis is about the struggle of women to balance their internal lives with their roles as mothers and wives.

I've read `The Long Silence', in fact it was the first novel I read upon setting foot on American soil in August 2000. We were made to turn up 3 weeks before school actually started for something called `pre-orientation' (go figure!), for `orientation' began only a week before the university was to open. The `pre-orientation' boiled down to teaching us how to speak English , specifically, the way it is spoken here. Needless to say some of us thought it a pointless exercise, some of us were irritated at the assumption that we actually desired to sound like Americans. One of the things we were supposed to do was give a presentation to prove that we could give presentations in English, mine was on the novel. Thanks to the presentation I still remember the plot/characters/tone of the novel fairly well, which is unusual for a novel I read so many years ago, especially one that wasn't extraordinary (it's well written but I'd find it hard to recommend it to...another guy?).

Labels: Miscellaneous