The Ever After of Ashwin Rao

by Padma Viswanathan, Sunil Malhotra (Read by)

Overview

From internationally acclaimed New Face of Fiction author Padma Viswanathan, a stunning new work set among families of those who lost loved ones in the 1985 Air India bombing, registering the unexpected reverberations of this tragedy in the lives of its survivors. A book of post-9/11 life, The Ever After demonstrates that violent politics are all-too-often homegrown in North America but ignored at our peril.

In 2004, almost 20 years after the fatal bombing of Air India Flight 182 from Vancouver, two suspects are - finally - on trial for the crime. Ashwin Rao, an Indian psychologist trained in North America, comes back to do a "study of comparative grief", interviewing people who lost loved ones in the attack. What he neglects to mention is that he, too, had family members who died on the plane. Then, to his delight and fear, he becomes embroiled in the lives of one family that remains unable to escape the undertow of the tragedy. As Ashwin finds himself less and less capable of providing the objective advice this particular family seeks, his surprising emotional connection to them pushes him to face his own losses.

The Ever After imagines the lasting emotional and political consequences of a real-life act of terror, confronting what we might learn to live with and what we can live without.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781543658736
Publisher:	Brilliance Audio
Publication date:	09/26/2017
Edition description:	Unabridged
Product dimensions:	5.25(w) x 6.75(h) x 0.67(d)

About the Author

Padma Viswanathan is a fiction writer, playwright and journalist, whose debut novel, The Toss of a Lemon, was shortlisted for the Amazon.ca First Novel Award, the Commonwealth Writer's Prize Best First Book Award (Canada and the Caribbean) and the PEN USA Fiction Award, and published to international acclaim. Her work has received many awards, including fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and support from the Canada Council, as well as residencies at the MacDowell Colony, the Banff Centre and the Sacatar Foundation. She lives with her husband, Geoffrey Brock, a poet and translator, and their two children in Fayetteville, Arkansas.

Read an Excerpt

It was only now that I realized: not only had I said nothing to my colleagues about my bereavement, I had said nothing about it in my letters to the victim families.

Okay, I thought now, That was wrong. But I did nothing to correct it.

It wasn’t only the need for scholarship that was motivating me. It wasn’t only the desire to give the victims a voice. (As one grieving man had said to Mukherjee and Blaise, “‘We are so wanting to talk! That wanting to talk is in all of us… we who have lost our entire families. We have nothing left except talk.’” That was eighteen years ago, but so many were still wanting to talk.)

It was, as much as anything, my desire to understand what had happened to me. I had not recovered. Did anyone, from so severe a blow? Perhaps not, but I had, in some way, stopped my life. This, I suspected, might be less true for the others. It didn’t seem to be true of Suresh, or he didn’t feel it to be. How or why did some absorb loss into life’s floodplains, while others erected a dam?

Editorial Reviews

Praise for The Ever After of Ashwin Rao

"There is no doubt that Viswanathan can write, and write well... a rich and absorbing novel."—World Literature Review

"Viswanathan’s intricate and empathetic tale deftly reveals the cultural rifts of immigration, post-9/11 politics, and conflicts of faith exposed by this real-world tragedy and its lasting reverberations."—Booklist

"This is an accomplished novel"—Kirkus

“The Ever After of Ashwin Rao is an intrepid novel, its sadness leavened by a wry humor.” —David Bezmozgis, author of The Betrayers

Praise for The Toss of a Lemon

"Padma Viswanathan has real talent..." —New York Times

"Irreconcilable conflicts between tradition—especially the strict caste rules of Brahmin life— and the modernizing world lead predictably to alienation and tragedy, but on an epic scale. Viswanathan is especially adept at unobtrusively explaining foreign customs and world views to Westerners while wholly respecting the power and significance they hold for practitioners." —Publishers Weekly

"Of a piece with the recent works of Vikram Seth, and reminiscent at times of Garcia Marquex—altogether a pleasure." —Kirkus(Starred Review)

From the Publisher

2015-03-17
Viswanathan's (The Toss of a Lemon, 2008) new novel explores both the personal and global aftermaths of a terrorist attack. Ashwin is a psychologist who aims to interview the families that lost loved ones in the 1985 Air India bombing; he counts himself among the mourning, having lost his sister and her children. Ashwin's project leads him to one specific family—especially a man named Venkat, who lost his wife and son in the tragedy. That this family eventually pushes Ashwin, the thoughtful academic, into a place of reckoning for his own loss comes as no surprise. What works remarkably well, however, is the detail with which Viswanathan tells her story. Want an account of how people, moment by moment, process tragedy? Read the long stretch toward the middle of this book when Ashwin tells the story of what Venkat's family does in the immediate aftermath of the bombing. It's powerful work, and the book as a whole imbeds the reader in the glacial pace of both grief and justice. That said, this is an easier book to admire than to like. It's a ponderous story about a ponderous subject, and the occasional moments of humor don't stave off the suffocating sense of importance. Ashwin proves a difficult narrator—a solitary man who misses not only his own family, but also a former love whose routines he sometimes maintains and who confesses that "most moments when I think of myself are bleak." At one point, he narrates, "I will tell you now, dear reader, because I want to tell you everything," but in this intentional slowness, the novel can get bogged down—perhaps a voice done too convincingly? This is an accomplished novel, but ironically enough, its successes make it sometimes tough to take.

Kirkus Reviews