Burnt Sugar / Blanc Dehors

Sometimes different things I’m reading at the same time for different reasons (work, pleasure, study) happen to resonate with each other, which is what happened last week with Martine Delvaux’s Blanc Dehors and Avni Doshi’s Burnt Sugar. 

Both books deal with difficult parent-child relationships, and both in different ways conveyed a certain despair, a kind of emotional pointlessness that feels like the dead hollow clangs of metal tumbling in a scrapyard. It was done deliciously, two different ways. 

I’m not a Professional Book Reviewer Person, and maybe my perception is coloured by the Times We Live In or whatever, but both texts depicted relationships that had no broader meaning, that resonated because they had no broader meaning. Delvaux laments an absent father, and the frustration of not having anything to really mourn: Doshi depicts a woman hemmed in, encircled by a relationship that seems parasitic, the opposite of nourishing, with no clear way out.

Both of them created this delicious deadness. And why do we - or maybe just I - love reading something in that flavour? I can see it driving other readers crazy, disgusting them, turning them off. The kind of aggressively positive and connection-oriented reader, perhaps, who tells their friends things like you can’t let him bother you so much or you just have to get out there. You know? The kind of person who doesn’t let you think too much, who sees wallowing as a self-indulgent sin. I get it. Maybe it is. But reading a book like this is kind of like ordering a very strange dessert just for the transient flavour, not because it’s good but because it’s interesting. I consume feelings when I’m reading, perhaps even more so than facts or stories or moralities. Qualia, I think the word is? These books had a randomly resonant qualia, separately and then together. 

Also, all the awards to Burnt Sugar’s cover designer. 

“I asked Nani what divorce was. She was inarticulate when it came to such matters, but tried to explain. 

‘When a husband and wife are not husband and wife anymore,’ I said, ‘does that mean the father is no longer a father?’

Nani held my gaze for a long time before allowing her lips to curve into a smile. ‘No,’ she said, ‘no, it does not.’” - Burnt Sugar