Madhuri Vijay is the author of The Far Field.From her Q&A with Scott Burton for the Los Angeles Review of Books:
SCOTT BURTON: Place is an important feature in your new novel, The Far Field. It largely plays out in Bangalore and a small village in mountainous Kashmir. What made you want to set the novel in these places?Visit Madhuri Vijay's website.
MADHURI VIJAY: In part, sheer familiarity. I grew up in Bangalore, and I spent a couple of years living and working in a village in Kashmir, so to set the novel in those two places seemed like the natural and obvious choice. But I was also aware that those places haven’t yet found much of a footing in fiction, and that was, I’m sure, part of their appeal. Countless Indian novels have been set in Bombay, Delhi, and Calcutta, but far fewer have been set in Bangalore. Likewise, I’ve read a fair number of books set in the lovely and embattled Valley of Kashmir, but none set in the region where I was living. I suppose I wanted in some small way to feel like I was treading fresh ground.
Equally vivid are the characters in the novel. We follow Shalini, the narrator, as she searches for a man from her past after her mother’s death. We discover she possesses a rich interior life as we follow her often-conflicted relationship with the other characters. Was she an enjoyable character to write?
She was fairly challenging, actually. The adult Shalini is so remote and closed-off, so hamstrung by doubt and suspicion, that...[read on]
--Marshal Zeringue