BR: The Alchemy of Desire (Tarun Tejpal)

Amazon Link: The Alchemy of Desire

I found this book at a second hand book fair and chose it because of its Indian author. I am eager to broaden my literary catalogue with authors from beyond western shores.

The front cover states that the book was a finalist for a literature prize while the back is filled with praise for what promised to be a luxuriously long novel, tepid with sensuality and rich with intricacies of modern India. Without hesitation, I forked out $7. Despite this book being nothing like what I would ordinarily read, I consider the money and my time (which was considerable) well spent.

The back jacket reads:

"A young couple from a small town in India, penniless but gloriously in love, move to the big city, where the man works feverously on a novel, stopping only to feed his ceaseless desire for his beautiful wife. In time the lovers abandon the city for an old house in the mist-shrouded Himalayas. While renovating their ramshackle new home, the young man unearths a chest full of diaries written by the previous owner. Thrust into another world and time, he slowly uncovers the dark secrets at the heart of her story."

The narrator is nameless, not even referred to in dialogue by another character, yet despite this oddity I had no trouble identifying him. For the first half of the book (or thereabouts), the narrator is obsessed with his wife, Fizz, deliriously so. They make love in every possible manner and, as the narrator convinced me, each time they physically connect the experience is more passionate and erotic than all those that preceded it. Though this is not a pornographic novel and the love scenes are crafted with attention to metaphor and simile, the explicit nature could be off-putting to some readers, and repetitive to others. Admittedly, the copy I purchased has an image of a bee pollinating a flower with a road leading into the distance, but had the cover been that which is shown on Amazon, with the figure of a woman, I would never have bought it – although that cover is definitely more representative of the book's content.

Beyond the love making (and yes, let's be honest, there is a lot of it), the narrator strives to write a sweeping, epic Indian novel while he and his wife are renovating a small cottage in the mountains. As the renovations go on, the narrator and his wife drift apart. Over time it becomes obvious to them both that their love is fed only by lust, if they're not having sex then there is very little between them. The separation is complete when he finds a box of old journals written by the previous owner of the home – an American woman who came to India as the wife of a gay prince. It's not too hard to guess that the woman was more of a sex deviant than the narrator, and soon he is fully immersed in reading of her experiences, so much so that he loses touch with reality.

The second half of the book fills in the woman's life, through the narrator who dreams of her, his dreams being so vivid and intense that he wakes in terror, convinced she has sexually violated him in his sleep. Representative of his carnal desires and increasing dysfunction, he longs for more contact with her, believing that he is experiencing the dead woman's ghost. When, finally, he reads the last journal and the fantasy dies, he comes to the awareness that he is alone, destitute, without his wife, friends, family – so completely has he shut them all out. The final pages have him searching for Fizz, hoping to reconnect, but she is gone and her friends (who used to be his) send him away.

The book opened with 'Love is not the greatest glue between two people. Sex is.' It ends in reverse, with the narrator having learned the greatest lesson of all.

This is a long book with a simple premise: one man's extraordinarily sensual journey to learn the truth about love. If it weren't for the polished writing style, I never could have withstood 518 pages of description, introspection and sex.

The narrator ponders on what is involved in writing a novelAbout writing a novel:

I had once read in school that poets let their poems mature in their head for a long time. Contrary to popular belief, poetry is not an instant inspirational process. Good poets, once lightning has struck, hunker down to wait. They allow all the ingredients to season and simmer to just the right taste and texture before taking them off the hotplate of their imagination and serving them up on paper.

Even after it is off the fire, the dish needs attention. Careful garnishing, decoration, tweaking. When you eat at a master's table, when you read a master's text, you do not partake of something sudden and speedy. Long hours and subtle spices – a lifetime of nuancing – lie behind it. There is no such thing as an instant masterpiece.

And sex:

I took the hard little ball of her ankle in my mouth and sucked it so fully that it acquired a deeply erotic dimension. I then journeyed to the promise of her fleshy calves and sucked them so fully that they became sexual organs. And then I slowly curved around the shin and ascended the dome of her knees, resting at the peak, mouth open and lips moving. Descending on the other side I banked to the back and drove my tongue flatly down the smooth highway of her inner thighs, eyes set firmly on the dark line of the final ranges. And so I journeyed slowly, seeking the source of the musk; and as I closer and closer and the flesh grew and grew and the musk grew and grew, my control began to waver. From my mouth I became my nose. From handing out pleasure I began to hunger for it. Window by window, my thinking mind shut down. Reason, intellect, analysis, perception, speech – everything went, one by one.

I was now an ancient beast, on all fours, prowling in pursuit of a spoor and a secret place.

Outside the pale of civilization.

An animal no longer to be denied.

And when I had drunk on the source, deep and long, I was nothing but a tumescence. I rose behind her and seeking traction held her at the waist, and as she looked down the rolling green slopes all the way to the sweltering north Indian plains, I began to move in the oldest dance of all.

The wind carried her moans to all corners of the subcontinent.

Rating: ***1/2 out of five.