Love, Stars, and All That

by Kirin Narayan

Believing her aunt's predictions, Gita, a young Indian graduate student, is certain that she will meet her jori, or Mr. Right, in March of 1984. By the author of Storytellers, Saints, and Scoundrels. 25,000 first printing.

Genres: Fiction, India, Novels

320 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1994

About the author

Kirin Narayan was born in India to an American mother and Indian father, and moved to the United States to attend college. As a graduate student, she studied cultural anthropology and folklore at the University of California—Berkeley, writing a dissertation on storytelling as a form of religious teaching through an ethnography of a Hindu holy man in Western India who often communicated teachings through vivid folk narratives. The book that resulted, Storytellers, Saints and Scoundrels: Folk Narrative in Hindu Religious Teaching (1989), won the first Victor Turner Prize for Ethnographic Writing from the American Anthropological Association and was co-winner of the Elsie Clews Prize for Folklore from the American Folklore Society. She then wrote a novel, Love, Stars and All That (1994) that was included in the Barnes and Nobles Discover Great New Writers program. In the course of researching women’s oral traditions in Kangra, Northwest Himalayas, she collaborated with Urmila Devi Sood to bring together a book of tales in the local dialect with discussions of their meaning and ethnographic context in Mondays on the Dark Night of the Moon: Himalayan Foothill Folktales (1997). An interest in family stories and diasporic experience inspired her to write My Family and Other Saints<?i> (2007), a memoir about spiritual quests. Her most recent book is Alive in the Writing: Crafting Ethnography in the Company of Chekhov (2012).

Kirin Narayan has received support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Institute of Indian Studies, the School of American Research, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the University of Wisconsin Institute for Research in the Humanities, and the University of Wisconsin Graduate School. She received a Chancellor’s Distinguished Teaching Award from the University of Wisconsin in 2011. Since 2001, she has served as an editor for the Series in Contemporary Ethnography at the University of Pennsylvania Press. She currently serves on the Committee of Selection for the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

(from https://researchers.anu.edu.au/resear...)

Reviews

[Yesha · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sweet book. One of the books I read again and again... one of my comfort reads. An intelligent yet light look at the life of a South Asian academic... in fiction, of course.

If this book had been written 10 years later, it would have become a huge "intellectual chicklit" success... as it was, it was one of the first of its kind and has unfortunately gone out of print.

I have actually had the privilege of meeting Kirin Narayan, who is a wonderful and generous person. She teaches in the Anthro/South Asian Studies field at U of Wisc Madison.

[Katherine Nally · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is about heritage, families, culture, friendship, and the role all of it plays in our lives. It's also, unsurprisingly, about love, stars, and all of that. As a white woman, it showed me a different perspective and an insight into a different culture.

The book starts out pretty slow, it was a bit difficult to get into, but I eventually did. The first half takes place over 6ish months while Gita is in graduate school in California, and the 2nd half takes place over another 6ish months 5-10 years later. I appreciated that this book spanned a decent amount of time, I liked seeing the character growth and development that takes place gradually over time that is missing from most books.

[Adobe · Rating 4 out of 5]

Gita Das, a shy Berkeley graduate student from India, is both alarmed and charmed when a family friend foretells that Gita will meet her future husband in March 1984. But as Gita nervously scrutinizes every man she encounters, she must find a middle path between the matrimonial traditions of India and the mercenary courtship rituals of North America. On the whole, she would prefer to burrow away within her research on the folk variations of Hindu legends -- but that, of course, is never an option.

Love, Stars, and All That is a sweet and thoughtful examination of gender roles, academia, and the art of juggling two national identities. It is not always gentle or even-handed in its depictions of secondary buffoons, such as lecherous professors and self-absorbed poets, but Gita herself undergoes a marvelous flowering during the course of the novel.

[Allyson Johnson · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a deft satire of American academia, insterspersed with an inter-cultural romance. Gita Das,an Indian girl studying folkloric traditions at UC Berkeley, is sexually naïve, romantically inclined, and buffeted between her Aunty Saroj’s marital expectations for her, and her own conflicted ambitions regarding marriage, relationships, and her academic career.
Most of the story is Gita’s, but we also get glimpses of the thoughts of the various romantic and not-so-romantic connections she makes, allowing the reader to see the chasm between Gita’s hopes and her prospective lovers’ actual intentions. Some chapters revert to India and the thoughts of Gita’s Aunty Saroj, as she steers through the jungle of gossip and tittle-tattle that seems to the stuff of Indian women’s social life.
I found myself skimming here and there, as Karin Narayan’s sendups of academic doubletalk became as tedious as their originals. But I stuck with Gita and made it to the Happy Ever After.

[Tamanna · Rating 4 out of 5]

quite nice..don't remember all the stories though

[Ilene · Rating 1 out of 5]

Not very interesing and not worth reviewing.

[Snail in Danger (Sid) Nicolaides]

Found this in the library's discard bin and figured I'd give it a shot. I was hoping for something maybe vaguely related to English, August. Sadly, no.

[Nora]

boring!