The Bones of Grace

Written in luminous prose and suffused with an air of yearning and melancholy, this follows Zubaida from a PhD at Harvard via an aborted archeological dig in Pakistan to her home in Bangladesh. Anam weaves a complex story of journeying and search: for history, for a sense of self, for acceptance and for homecoming. Along the way we have a glorious portrait of a love affair, of various marriages, and of Bangladesh: its hierarchical social structures, its past struggle for independence, its abuses and its beauties.

What makes this book so impressive is Anam's narrative control and her ability to view the world and characters with complexity rather than reductively. It's a mark of her sophisticated vision that the place of greatest human abuse is also where Zubaida experiences her greatest happiness; that the haunting image of the skeleton of a prehistoric whale is matched by the vision of a ship being stripped back to its bare timbers beached on the sand.

It can be difficult to create empathy for a protagonist who is inclined to passivity but here, too, Anam pulls it off: Zubaida's motivations are sometimes opaque but its precisely this quality which makes her feel so real. A gorgeous, graceful piece of writing that confirms Anam as a writer to watch.

This was complicated in a good way. Eventually it made sense. Starting from the academia of Harvard we cross to Pakistan in search of an extinct whale who walked the earth, we then cross over to Bangladesh. Here we then come to the family saga story as well. Complicated again because the conflict of ideology between the old brigade and the young people, the identity crisis of who you actually are, trying to conform to traditional roles is rather difficult for Zubaida but she does try.

An archaelogical search to unearth something strange and unheard of entwined with a love story of Zubaida who is trying to balance the sudden appearance of love with the expected role which she has never said no to of being the bride of a family friend where they are just waiting for her return to announce an engagement. How does Zubaida reconcile the two? how does she think her role as wife in a traditional household will work with her career?

A conflict which is ever present for modern educated girls in Asia - where do you draw the line between personal desires and the desires of the family. Unlike in Western culture, in closed small communities in Asia it is the community that is important not the individual and how much is one willing to sacrifice for this. The story with the unusual theme of paleontologists, political upheaval, tribal warfare, love and family was beautifully told as it is always by this author.

Haunting and deeply emotional.

Goodreads and Amazon review up on 3/2/2017. Review on my blog mid June