![]() ![]() Olivia's story is swoony and fatalistic, overpowering as the heat and the dust, but although her inheritor's account has certain parallels, the comedown into contemporary mores and morals makes plain the trade-off that progress has entailed. Isolated and bored in her European-style bower, she drifts into an affair with a charming but bankrupt prince and after aborting his child, remains in a mountain exile alone there for the rest of her life. Olivia comes to India as a young administrator's bride in 1923. Jhabvala's eighth novel intertwines two stories of two Indias over half a century, and what the book is really about is the social sea change that separates the lifestyle of the narrator, as recorded in her journal, from that of her grandfather's first wife, Olivia, whose story the modern heroine is pursuing through the old letters she carries with her. ![]()
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