When we first meet the eponymous character of Maithreyi Karnoor’s debut, Sylvia (2021) she’s a freelance travel writer working on an article about baobab trees in India. These trees, with their bulbous trunks and “clawing branches”, have stood for over a thousand years, their seeds having been transported from Africa by long-forgotten migrants. Similarly, her uncle Bhaubaab is from Tanzania and has retraced his grandfather’s Goan heritage in search of a home. The play between baobab and Bhaubaab sets up a clear contrast between something securely rooted in time and a man looking to root himself but is also just one of many puns that feature in an experimental novel that’s breezy to read but rewards a slower approach.
The Book takes the form of the baobab with the chunkier first part comprising a single tale that acts as a base for the latter half, a series of nine intertwined short stories that represent the branches. In these, the Sylvia we see visiting her uncle comes and goes, passing through others’ lives – as friend; as colleague; as wife – and the indelible marks left along the way. Admittedly, it can be confusing to bring these stories together, given their non-linearity and subtle references to each other, but it’s a solvable jigsaw asking some effort from the reader.
However, given Karnoor’s obvious penchant for wordplay, there’s another Sylvia resonating through the book, and that’s the forest that surrounds the villages, providing an ecological angle. Beginning with well-water affected by landfill, we see the encroachment of civilisation on a way of life once isolated within the forest. Deforestation leads to roads and gated communities; it leads to the loss of traditions and cultures. When Bhaubab, on capturing a snake says “it does not need to die for being in my way”, it feels like a plea for the forest against the entropy of progress.
It’s a novel that seems to be about so much that it sometimes feels like it’s about nothing. Karnoor touches on religion, superstition, motherhood, depression, poverty, class, traditions, social media, and more, but ultimately, in a few recurring motifs, it’s about the idea of home and how its characters, whatever their experiences, find their individual comfort. Home, as Bhaubaab learns is “an ephemeral idea”. Such temporary comforts nourish as the book celebrates the minutiae and meaning of our lives against a more cosmic scale.
But being sustained on a melting pot of ideas doesn’t always make Sylvia an engaging work. A lack of immediacy in the later stories keeps us some distance from the action and the seemingly random order of the tales brings cloudiness to a book full of blue skies. However, the prose is light and colourful, and positively bristles with enjoyable wordplay (“Heresy and hearsay are closely connected.”). Where an older Sylvia worries that her medication is suppressing “the springs of kaleidoscopic imagination”, it seems Karnoor has had no problem tapping their source.
