Shards of Memory

by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

A young man named Henry sits down with his grandmother, a genial lady still called Baby by everyone, in her Manhattan townhouse where he has lived all his life, to record the history of a spiritual movement that has woven itself into the fabric of their family's lives for four generations. What unfolds is a mesmerizing family the imperious great-grandmother Elsa and her husband, an Indian poet, whose marriage is as unconventional as the movement they help to found; Baby, their cheerfully pragmatic daughter, married to the aloof English diplomat Graeme; bemused and brooding Renata, Baby and Graeme's daughter, married to an idle dreamer; and finally Henry, Renata's son, who in many ways bears the legacy of all that has gone before. Their lives--and that of the movement's elusive yet ineluctable founder, known only as the Master--intertwine, diverge, and collide with each other in a masterfully orchestrated story spanning the twentieth century and several continents.By turns brilliantly satiric, insightful, and profoundly moving, Shards Of Memory is a beautifully wrought tale of love and devotion, of family and faith, and of the complex nature of memory itself--a literary tour de force from one of the most distinguished novelists of our time.

Genres: Fiction, India, British Literature, Literary Fiction, Historical Fiction

Paperback

First published January 1, 1995

About the author

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala was a British and American novelist and screenwriter. She is best known for her collaboration with Merchant Ivory Productions, made up of film director James Ivory and producer Ismail Merchant.
In 1951, she married Indian architect Cyrus Jhabvala and moved to New Delhi. She began then to elaborate her experiences in India and wrote novels and tales on Indian subjects. She wrote a dozen novels, 23 screenplays, and eight collections of short stories and was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the Diplomatic Service and Overseas List of the 1998 New Years Honours and granted a joint fellowship by BAFTA in 2002 with Ivory and Merchant. She is the only person to have won both a Booker Prize and an Oscar.

Reviews

[Linda DiMeo Lowman · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was so disappointed with this book. I kept waiting for it to get better and then it ended. Interesting enough to read to the end, but nothing really came together and the ending was horrible. Definitely shards.

[Parvoneh · Rating 4 out of 5]

A quiet, sprawling book. It felt very British while actually being set in so many places--England, Mumbai, New York--and featuring people from so many other places (Germany, Russia, maybe Kabul?). Ruth Prawer Jhabvala does a nice job sneaking in all of these complicated relationships (to people, to place, to family) without ever letting the novel get murky or confusing. She does love a little mystery; her "Master" figure and the work of that social movement remain elusive, which somehow works in the end, despite looming so large in each character's life. At times I was reminded of Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook--here, too we find exoticizing moments, even of one's own family, feelings of regret and reflection, and a sense of urgency and overwhelming work to be done. The Golden Notebook takes an explicitly political angle, though, while Shards of Memory is more invested in individuals, individual growth, and the individual cast that makes up a family.

I'm not sure if Jhabvala's narration made all of the exoticizing and imperialism unpalatable enough (Grame, her English foreign official, treats women of color as conquests quite often :\) and at times her characters are almost caricatures. She does hint at some things being missing, at some things being unknown or shut away, and those moments made me forgive the other, more troubling moments, as maybe more complicated and less uncritical.

This isn't an entirely plot-driven book, and it's not really interested in being creative through language, and the characters lack a certain level of interiority, yet I still thought it all pieced together really well. Not quite postcolonial lit, not quite diaspora lit, but something like it that puzzled me in an enjoyable way.

[ada ☽ · Rating 2 out of 5]

This novel was engaging and well-written, but it did not really appear to have a point. Maybe its not having a clear message was exactly the argument it was trying to make about spiritualism and family dynamics and life in general… In any case, while I had an enjoyable reading experience, it left me dissatisfied.

[H · Rating 5 out of 5]

A story of how the smallest decisions in our lives can shape our futures dramatically. Fantastic!

[Sergei · Rating 3 out of 5]

An odd book. Well written and entertaining, but it never really goes anywhere and by the end, one wonders: what was the point? Of writing it AND reading it.

[Eric O. Schultz · Rating 1 out of 5]

I enjoyed the first third of this book; Jhabvala creates a set of characters- most of whom are related by blood and marriage, and then she chronicles their strange relationships with each other. There are two, interwtined sets of characters: a privileged group who come from bourgeois money and who are now mostly indolent- and a second set who descend from Russian émigrés, who were once privileged prior to the revolution but who are now penniless. The latter group essentially lives by begging/ mooching off other rich people. What further connects these two sets of people is a shady character known only as the Master, a kind of charlatan guru Jhabvala enjoys writing about. Usually her charlatan guru is Indian, but this time he's ethnically undefined: a literary choice that perhaps marks the figure as universal.

Only there's nothing very universal about him. At one point Jhabvala mentions what she describes as his "universal" philosophy, which is that life is struggle. And while it is true that many ancient cultures see life as suffering, this isn't the same as thinking all life is struggle, which has clear European origins. The idea or life as struggle has developed in our "Western" consciousness in a very unique way that is different from the idea that life is suffering, which one readily finds in ancient Buddhist, Jewish, and Greek traditions (amongst others). It has a capitalist/classist history; and it is about power and domination. It’s interesting that Jhabvala conflates it all. Anyhow, besides this, we get nothing else about the Master or his movement, or even see why people are attracted to it. Indeed, he and his followers reflect the dynamics that exist between the two families; the master is poor, and his followers are rich; he mooches off them and they submit themselves to parasitism. In the case of the two families, the relationship is old fashioned noblesse oblige, while the relationship between the master and his followers is reversed; the moocher has the power and his rich followers are the weak ones.

This is typical Jhabvala fare. I'm not sure, however, if there's anything insightful here. In some sense, this dynamic is about the nature of goodness- that goodness requires submission to parasitism, and in the case of idealist, the submission becomes masochistic. It's like that Eurythmics song that goes "Some of them want to abuse you; some of them want to be abused." I, however, never meet people with this level of goodness, and certainly not privileged ones; it's a rarity- if it even exists- so I'm not sure how much it tells us about the world or human nature. After having read a few such Jhabvala novels, typically her later ones, I've grown bored. By the time this was published, her best works were long behind her.

Note: It’s also interesting to note that she associates the Master with the Indian independence movements (there were several); Also, Jhabvala portrays the politicians of independent India as having an unseemly naked desire for power, as characterized by the Niece figure in the novel; maybe Jhabvala prefers that Indians continued their Ma-Bap relationship they had with the English, or at least the one novelist Paul Scott imagined that they had; never mind the colonial theft and the famines the British wrought; Jhabvala also never examines the life of her bourgeois families; after all, maintaining money, once you have it, also requires an exercise of naked power. Oh, well. Jhabvala is not a great artist, just a conservative one and maybe a neurotic one.

[Glennis · Rating 4 out of 5]

A memorable family.

[Katie M. · Rating 3 out of 5]

An intriguing multigenerational saga.

[Cynthia]

Far East, India

[Juli · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5