The Archer
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
“Set in 1970s Bombay, the novel explores art, ambition, gender roles and class with the same shimmering prose of Swamy’s first book, the story collection A House Is a Body.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
“[A] sublime, boundary-pushing exploration of sexuality, creativity, and love.”
—NPR
In this transfixing novel, a young woman comes of age in 1960s- and 1970s-era Bombay, a vanished world that is complex and indelibly rendered. Vidya’s childhood is marked by the shattering absence and then the bewildering reappearance of her mother and baby brother at the family home. Restless, observant, and longing for connection with her brilliant and increasingly troubled mother, Vidya navigates the stifling expectations of her life with a vivid imagination until one day she peeks into a classroom where girls are learning kathak, a dazzling, centuries-old dance form that requires the utmost discipline and focus. Her pursuit of artistic transcendence through kathak soon becomes the organizing principle of her life, even as she leaves home for college and falls in complicated love with her best friend. As the uncertain future looms, she must ultimately confront the tensions between romantic love, her art, and the legacy of her own imperfect mother.
Lyrical and deeply sensual, with writing as mesmerizing as kathak itself, Shruti Swamy’s The Archer is a bold portrait of a singular woman coming of age as an artist—navigating desire, duty, and the limits of the body. It is also an electrifying and utterly immersive story about the transformative power of art, and the possibilities that love can open when we’re ready.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Swamy's affecting debut novel (after A House is a Body) follows a woman's interest in dance and self-determination after growing up in poverty in 1960s Northern India. At seven, after Vidya's father dies and her mother becomes an unreliable presence, she encounters a class of girls learning kathak, a form of Indian classical dance. By the time she's in her teens, Vidya has become a dedicated kathak pupil, devoted to the "wild, nearly unbearable pleasure" of dance. In college, she studies engineering while continuing to work every day with a new dance teacher from Bombay. Always set slightly apart from her peers by her poverty and intensity, Vidya is surprised by the depth of her connection to another student, the solitary and brilliant Radha. Swamy writes with keen perception of Vidya's anger and unyielding will to dance, despite her predicament (she never forgets that she is "dark, overeducated, unpedigreed"). Later in the book, after Vidya's brief romance with Radha, she marries a man from a very different socioeconomic class, a decision that further illustrates how the odds are stacked against her as a young woman attempting to live on her own terms. Swamy confidently evokes the time and place with spare, precise prose. This writer continues to demonstrate an impressive command of her craft.
