Ghachar Ghochar
A young man in Bangalore sits in an old coffee shop and thinks about his family: the years of scarcity, the uncle whose spice business made them rich, the large house they moved into and what money did to everyone in it.
About
Ghachar Ghochar is a novella by the Kannada writer Vivek Shanbhag, published in 2013 and translated into English by Srinath Perur.
The narrator is unnamed, unemployed, and spends his days in a coffee house where the waiter seems to him to know something about what is coming. What he describes is his family's move from a crowded house and a modest income to a large house and a great deal of money, and what the money did to the people who received it: his father's retirement, his mother's new authority, his sister's divorce, his aunt's silence. The family's wealth arrives through his uncle's spice business, and it brings obligations and quarrels that nobody is willing to name. The title is a phrase invented by his wife and her brother for things that are knotted past the point of undoing.
The book is short and is told in a single voice, and it closes on an act the narrator describes without explaining, which leaves the reader to decide what the family has become.
Book details
- Author
- Vivek Shanbhag
- First published
- 2013
- Series
- No series listed
- Subgenre
- Translated literary fiction, Family novel
- Primary genre
- Literary Fiction
- Tags
- No tags for this book.
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