Tomb of Sand by Geetanjali Shree

This book, winner of the Booker International Prize, is about an 80 year old woman with depression. She is small, so small she might disappear, drift away, go up in smoke. She leaves her house and crosses with her daughter into Pakistan. She travels to Lahore, where she lived as a girl, and then to Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, where she goes looking for her ex-husband, Anwar. The invisibility of women in modern India is one of many themes in this book that is both rambling and poetic. There are multiple scenes of men who are full of themselves and the many ways that women have to ignore them. There are cultural commentaries on modern India and the partition, many of which I am sure I missed, because there is so much allegory and I do not know enough to follow the subtext. Sometimes even the text goes over my head. Here is the thing--Tomb of Sand is not for everyone. I am not even sure it is for me, although I enjoyed reading it. The reason if my put some readers off is it abandons many of the narrative conventions of time, space, even character. It requires attention, a willingness to be immersed in a pseudo-magical world for long periods of time, and an openness to digression.