![]() Tiptoe-ing past, she peers in and realizes that Aunt Pishima - who's, as usual, sitting, glaring in her chair - is stone cold dead. To do so, she has to pass the open door of the apartment of her great aunt-in-law, a bitter dragon who was married at 7 and widowed at 12. Stuck inside the crumbling family compound, Somlata decides one afternoon to climb to the roof for air. ![]() Soon after the wedding, Somlata's mother-in-law tells her it's her job to reverse the family's fortunes by "pestering" her husband to work. The central character here, Somlata, is an 18-year-old woman from a poor family newly married to a handsome, "blissfully unemployed" older man from a once wealthy clan. But there's nothing canned about this story, which has the allure of a feminist fractured fairy tale. A heartwarming multi-generational tale of three Bengali women sounded to me like a variant on a lot of mass-market women's fiction. ![]() The novel's flip title was a draw its plot summary wasn't. Dubbed a modern Bengali classic, it's just been published for the first time in the United States. ![]() The Aunt Who Wouldn't Die is a short 1993 novel by the Benagali writer Shirshendu Mukhopadhyay. They have nothing in common apart from the fact that, at first glance, they're easy to underestimate. Let's cut to the chase: I have two novels to recommend. ![]()
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