‘The Magnificent Ruins’: A sprawling family drama that suffers from the outside-in gaze
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There’s a lot going for Lila De – a publishing job in New York City, a father and stepmother and a half family who adore her, a sweet man who is enamoured with her, colleagues and a job she actually likes, and her mother, with whom she has a fraught relationship, is safely many thousand miles away in Kolkata. Everything in Lila’s life in the US is carefully constructed, in stark contrast to the messy, difficult childhood she’s left behind in India.
The home and the world
Nayantara Roy’s sprawling immigrant novel, family drama, The Magnificent Ruins, pulls the immigrant daughter right back into what she has hoped to escape all her life. Her maternal grandfather Tejen, the Lahiri scion and former member of one of the wealthiest families in Kolkata’s Ballygunge, has died, and it is to her that he has left the five-storey mansion where the Lahiri clan resides. The mansion, quite dilapidated now and long past its glorious days, is in desperate need of a makeover. Lila, only 29, has two options – either to sell it off and divide the inheritance equally, or repair it so that the family can live in better comfort.
A house, of course, especially one that has lived through...