Clear Light of Day Compendium

General Ideas/Questions

To whom is the narrator relating this story? Descriptions are clearly pitched as if meant to an audience -- pg 14: "…his head hanging so low that one would have thought it unnatural, physically impossible." There must be a specific person in mind who would think that, beyond the narrator who could have simply said that it was impossible.

Why moving backwards in time/why the constant refrains (slugs/the music) repeated in each of these time periods? Clearly heavily relevant, but it feels rather ornate and heavy-handed. There must be something else that these choices are accomplishing.

Passages

Page 21: "Bakul said one could rise above the climate, that one could ignore it if one filled one's mind with so many thoughts and activities that there was no room for it. 'Look at me,' he had said the winter that they froze in Moscow. 'I don't let the cold immobilize me, do I?" and she and the girls, swaddled in all their warm clothing and the quilts and blankets off their beds, had had to agree that he did not. And gradually he had trained her and made her into an active, organized woman who looked up her engagement book every morning, made plans and programs for the day ahead and then walked her way through them to retire to her room at night, tired with the triumphant tiredness of the virtuous and the dutiful. Now the engagement book lay at the bottom of her trunk. Bim had said nothing of engagements and, really, she could not bear to have any in this heat. The day stretched out like a sheet of glass that reflected the sun - too bare, too exposed to be faced." I'm fascinated first by this idea of training her to be strong being the same thing as training her to obey him at all times. Also, this paragraph is wonderful in the way that it uses the lessons learned in the snow to survive extreme heat.

Page 52: "Now it was Raja who retreated, who avoided him and tried to wriggle out of these confrontations by staying close to Aunt Mira and his sisters. They were all astonished by the way the father began to turn up in their midst while they were having a quietly domestic tea, or bickering over their homework, and began to address Raja as though he were not one of them but one of the adults, a person with whom adult affairs could be discussed. Raja was silent now. He had not expected this. He had certainly expected his father to oppose him, but ineffectually and non-verbally, merely with arrogance and silence. Raja was not really prepared to reason or debate with his father. He was carried away by ideas, on wings of imagination, not by reason or analysis. Recognizing his father's superior forces, he dispiritedly gave in and ceased to argue." This section resonated with me immediately, first because the way that Raja feels righteously superior and yet unable to defend himself in the face of opposition is very familiar to me. Moreover, this is the first time we've really seen Raja or his father, and yet we immediately understand the situation perfectly, and indeed this was one of the most moving of relationships (and sections) in the novel, to me.

Themes

Whether one can be trained into their personhood vs. one being the person they were raised to be.

Growing apart vs. staying (Bim vs Raja, Bim vs. Tara)

The world pulling family away from itself (the Misras taking Tara, Hyder Ali pulling at Raja)

The power of history (floating back in time to answer questions/add resonance)

Techniques

3rd person omniscient, revealed halfway through page two, and the first transfer of consciousness is done in a small moment (albeit the biggest moment so far in the book), as Tara looks at a snail and has an emotional response to it. Seems to suggest an extremely fluid use of the omniscient, and yet alternately a very tight focus on each character when we're in their heads. In fact, much of the time we're not even in their heads, simply looking at them in an almost objective POV.

Page 10: "'I'll get ready,' said Tara, instantly getting to her feet as if in relief. Bim, who remembered her as a languid little girl, listless, a dawdler, noted her quick movements, her efficient briskness, with some surprise, but said nothing." The omniscient narrator doesn’t know everything. There are times, such as when Tara speaks, when the narrator is making assumptions as to how a person thinks (as if in relief), and then just a moment later we're close enough to Bim both to remember with her and to see exactly how she thinks about Tara's movement. We weren't previously established in Bim's POV, so the author is choosing which thoughts she'll stand behind entirely and which will be assumptions. To what purpose?

Doubling a simile, used quite often. Page 15: "…his voice rising to a shrill peak and then breaking on Baba's head like eggs, or slivers of glass."

Page 41: "…the sisters thought…" This dual emotion/thought/expectation is used constantly.

Page 74: "Baba nodded, and she wnet with him to a corner where an old-fashioned His Master's Voice gramophone stood on a small three-legged table, on the lower shelf of which were stacked the records…" I've been thinking throughout this novel that the records were played too hard, but here there's a deftness, a soft touch, that feels perfect. The record player is simply discovered, in the middle of doing something far more important, and picked up and taken along -- it becomes an important item, but here it's importance is to the reader who recognizes it more than to the participants who will come to treasure it. A strong, strong move.

Page 77: "Life spread in a pool around her, low and bright, lapping at her feet, but then quickly, treacherously rising to her ankles, to her knees. She had to get out of it. She had to lift herself out before it rose to her waist, to her armpits…Not to panic, she whispered to herself. It is a pool, it must not spread. Gather it, contain it. Here, in this bottle. A tall, fine bottle." We've been very tightly in-scene for a while, and here we're slipping out to a what seems like a metaphor, except that "life" here is referring to the alcohol as well, so that we're given this incredibly poetic moment where for the first time I'm truly understanding and sympathizing with everything that's been put on Bim's plate as she tries to take care of the family on one hand, even though we're in the aunt's POV (the words, for a while, looked like they could be from either point of view, so I saw them as representative of both) and at the same time this great poetic device is also holding us in the scene and referring to a very specific moment and action as the aunt falls into her narcotic delusions.

Words

Koels

Albuminous

Porphyry

Balustrade

Malaviscus

Stories/lines/ideas to steal/attempt

Page 2: "Her face wrinkling with disgust, her mother turned and paced on without a word, leaving Tara on her knees to contemplate the quality of disillusion." In flashback, a child in the moment, but the description of response is still written from mindset/speech style of the older POV.

Page 10: "…while the morning took another stride forward and stood with its feet planted on the tiled floor." Vivid anthropomorphizing for the sake of beauty and naught else.

Page 25: "…as if she was unsure if this image were real or only imagined. It had the making of a legend, with the merest seed of truth."

Page 40: "There was something insubstantial about his long slimness…such a total absence of being, of character,  of clamoring traits and characteristics."

Page 64: "Their father had died suddenly." Then we get roughly a page explaining how this happened. Then the father has been dead, and we see the effects of that death, but really not overmuch. The family is said to move on as if he's simply always at the club, simply gone for longer periods of time, and it feels exactly like that in the writing -- his death is acknowledged, described, and then mostly ignored.