The Hope Factory (Lavanya Sankaran)

http://www.lavanyasankaran.com/

With humor, intelligence, and masterly prose, Lavanya Sankaran’s debut novel brilliantly captures the vitality and danger of a newly industrialized city and how it shapes the dreams and aspirations of two very different families.
 
Anand is a Bangalore success story: successful, well married, rich. At least, that’s how he appears. But if his little factory is to grow, he needs land and money, and, in the New India, neither of these is easy to find.
 
Kamala, Anand’s family’s maid, lives perilously close to the edge of disaster. She and her clever teenage son have almost nothing, and their small hopes for self-betterment depend on the contentment of Anand’s wife: a woman to whom whims come easily.
 
But Kamala’s son keeps bad company, and Anand’s marriage is in trouble. The murky world where crime and land and politics meet is a dangerous place for a good man, particularly one on whom the well-being of so many depends.
 
Rich with irony and compassion, Lavanya Sankaran’s The Hope Factory affirms her gifts as a born storyteller with remarkable prowess, originality, and wisdom.

Je ne sais plus où j'ai trouvé ce titre, mais il m'avait plu. Et le récit colle bien au titre. Parfois, on tombe sur des livres simples, sans prétention. The Hope Factory en fait partie. Lavanya Sankaran nous offre une histoire très réaliste, sans tomber dans le mélo. Quand elle tente le moins reluisant, ce n'est pas vraiment convaincant. Après tout, on peut faire des livres optimistes et charmants, sans ombre de sordide. Et ce n'est pas plus mal. Il s'agit d'un premier roman, l'auteure a peut-être voulu en faire un peu trop.

L'action se déroule à Bangalore, ville des agences de traduction et des call centers. A moins que ce ne soit Mumbai. Lavanya Sankaran évoque l'évolution de Bangalore de village en ville ultra-moderne, explique la juxtaposition des différents quartiers. A travers les aventures d'Anand, patron d'une petite usine, et de Kamala, qui travaille comme bonne chez Anand, elle nous raconte la corruption qui sévit en Inde, la lutte quotidienne pour subsister du « petit peuple » de Bangalore, les problèmes des riches, le poids de la famille et de la tradition, et l'importance des apparences.

Je n'en dis pas plus. L'histoire est très simple, mais très prenante. Le style de Lavanya Sankaran est très agréable. J'attends avec impatience le prochain roman.

Deux extraits :

            The first time Anand had traveled abroad, years before, to meet a potential client in Germany, he had not been able to stop staring: at the roads, the bridges, the tunnels, the cars, the trains, at the organized reliability of it all, so startled by such careless munificence he almost wept. When asked later to describe his trip, he was typically laconic: "Everything works," he said. He had not been successful with the client; they had doubted Indian manufacturing capability.

         The same trip, on a flight, he had met a German engineer who had complained bitterly about the proposed extension in Germany of a thirty-five-hour workweek. "So terrible!" the German had said. Anand, working a seventy-hour week with Ananthamurthy, had agreed politely, but inside, he had doubted. Within that conversation, he knew, lay the seeds of Western downfall, the stoic industry of their ancestors deteriorating into whining, waffling plaint, as full of fidgets as a spoiled child. It was the mirror image of his own existence.

            And as for Harry Chinappa, what had he done, really, to earn anyone's respect? He belonged to the generation that had achieved nothing—suffocated, they claimed, by the government's restrictive socialist policies, but, in a democracy, was that really any excuse? Theirs was the generation that had refused to look forward, gazing instead for inspiration to the British, whom their own parents and grandparents had kicked out of the country, aping their mannerisms and talking, like sighing damsels in unrequited love, of the wonder of times gone by and the marvelous organization of the British empire. Which one of them had stepped forward to embrace the freedom so hard-won, which of them had dared to contemplate empires of their own? No, much easier to mope and romanticize the past—as though the British, when in India, had invited these people to tea, torn down those signs in front of their stupid, beloved ex-colonial clubs that said: indians and dogs not allowed. Did he remember any of that, Harry Chinappa? Did he, in his own life, demonstrate what it took to be a man?

Comments

[Jackie Brown]

Je n'en ai pas lu assez pour m'en rendre compte. Pas de problème avec celui-ci.

[Alex mot a mots]

C'est ce que je reproche aux romans indiens, ils sont toujours un peu alambiqués.