My Beloved Life

September 1, 2023

Born in an Indian village in 1935 after his mother survives a cobra bite while pregnant, Jadunath Kunwar goes on to lead what might be called an ordinary life. Yet he becomes a historian; meets poets, politicians, and even the sherpa who first summited Everest; and continues learning from a daughter who becomes a television journalist in the United States. The story of how each life can be luminous; from the author of Immigrant, Montana, a New Yorker Best Book. Prepub Alert.

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Copyright 2023 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from November 27, 2023
Kumar (A Time Outside This Time) unfurls a majestic Indian family saga in successive bildungsroman narratives of a father and daughter. Jadu Kunwar, an 80-something history professor in Patna, remembers the moment his mother gave birth to him in 1935 in their small village. Bitten by a cobra during the delivery, she later points to her survival as an auspicious sign for Jadu’s strength (“All the terrors that life held could not destroy you”). The remainder of Jadu’s story underscores that sentiment as it recounts his coming-of-age, marriage, and the birth of his daughter, Jugnu. While Jugnu is a young girl in the 1960s, Jadu temporarily leaves Patna to attend UC Berkeley on a Fulbright scholarship, citing as his inspiration sherpa Tenzing Norgay, who climbed Mt. Everest to move from “misery to prosperity.” In the novel’s second part, set after Jadu’s death in 2020, Jugnu, who is now a journalist in Atlanta, attempts to write his obituary. The occasion prompts her to reexamine the trajectory of her father’s life from country boy to city man, and reflect on how it mirrors her own quest to reinvent herself by leaving Patna to study at Emory University. A stunning final chapter sheds new light on their stories with a revelation about their genealogy. Kumar excels at blending mysticism and a refined cosmopolitan perspective, and the twinned stories offer an intriguing testament to the book’s epigraph, which comes from Janet Malcolm: “No story is told exactly the same way twice.” Readers will find much to savor.

December 1, 2023

In this lovely examination of memory and perception, multi-award-winning novelist, essayist, and Vassar professor of English Kumar (A Time Outside This Time) explores a century of Indian history through the life of Jadu, a country boy whose college education expands his worldview. Readers experience the dissolution of the British Raj during the 1947 Partition, Indira Gandhi's war with Pakistan, the creation of Bangladesh, and Prime Minister Gandhi's two-year crack down on civil liberties and the press. Jadu's reflections on his student days, in particular the complex caste system, his marriage, his friendships, and his teaching career, are all seen through the prism of these historical events. About halfway through this leisurely tale, Kumar switches gears, introducing the more immediate first-person voice of Jadu's daughter Jugnu, an Atlanta-based journalist with CNN, whose reminiscences juxtapose intriguingly with Jadu's own, even as Jugnu's reportage shows the influence of more recent history: the 2016 U.S. presidential election, its aftermath, and the scourge of COVID. VERDICT Storytelling as a key to understanding one's past, whether far or not so distant, is at the heart of this intergenerational historical novel. Recommend to admirers of Isabel Allende, Yaa Gyasi, or Min Jin Lee.--Sally Bissell

Copyright 2023 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

December 1, 2023
In his latest novel, Kumar, author of A Time outside This Time (2021), delivers an ambitious portrait of Jadunath Kumar (Jadu) that spans more than eight decades. In part one, readers learn of Jadu's humble beginnings. Born in 1935 in a small village in India, Jadu reflects on and discloses childhood memories and remembers his development, his struggles, and his formative years in college and as an adult teaching history at a university in Patna. As a young man, Jadu marries and has a daughter, Jugnu. Part two is told by Jugnu, who remembers Jadu, dwells on his sacrifices, and considers his death in 2020 from COVID-19. Part three shifts back to Jadu, now with new challenges and perspectives as an older man suffering from the fatal virus. Part four carries Jadu's story forward in an abstract way. Unifying themes around memory, storytelling, and history, Kumar's novel exquisitely blends fiction and nonfiction by juxtaposing Jadu's life with the history of India through Independence to the present and ending amid the devastating impact and aftermath of COVID-19 in India.

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Starred review from February 15, 2024
A quiet, appealing, deceptively ambitious Indian (and Indian American) family saga covering 1935-2020. The novel looks at the outset like old-fashioned realism: a sympathetic, slowly cumulative account of an "ordinary" life. Jadunath Kunwar is born in a superstitious backwater without electricity. A good student, he's first in his family to attend college (a highlight is meeting Tenzing Norgay, fresh from summiting Everest). Jadu becomes a modestly successful historian, a husband, father to a daughter. His life's most dramatic events occur around its edges: his mother's near-fatal cobra bite during her pregnancy, the theft of his daughter's dowry by a cutpurse, a brief stretch in jail after a protest. The author's daring here takes the unusual form of modesty, quiet, calm; few big plot elements arise, and Kumar leaves lots of space for digression, anecdote, observation, and Jadu's well-meaning mildness. Kumar's patience--and the reader's--pays off handsomely, though, when we jump forward to the end of Jadu's life as seen through his daughter Jugnu's eyes and grasp the book's full sweep. The crowning (minor) glory of Jadu's career is a Fulbright year at Berkeley in 1988. That trip abroad becomes the spur or permission Jugnu needs, after her husband commits a crime and her marriage founders, to settle in the U.S. as a journalist for CNN. The novel follows the father and daughter all the way to the Covid-19 pandemic, and along the way it provides an immersive, poignant portrait both of India over 85 years and of the whipsawing experience of being an Indian citizen of the larger world. But mostly, in the end, it pays tribute to two people who make noticing, attentiveness, and storytelling the central pillars of their lives. Late in the book, Jugnu encapsulates the novel's premise and ambition when she says, "I believe strongly that we are in touch with a great astonishing mystery when we put honest words down on paper to register a life and to offer witness." An immersive, moving portrait that steadily gathers intensity, vividness, and surprise.

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