2 weeks Ago
When Lila De’s mother calls her at 7:15 a.m. on her birthday after giving her the silent treatment for over a year, Lila is too weary of their tempestuous relationship to pick up the phone.
Big changes are coming at the publishing house in New York where Lila works, along with a long-hoped-for promotion, and family drama is the last thing she has time for. After ignoring more calls from her mother throughout the day, however, Lila sees her grandfather’s face in a social-media post and immediately realizes he didn’t call her the previous Sunday when he would normally have for their weekly chat ..
. and she was too busy to notice. Finally answering her mother’s call, Lila learns that not only has her grandfather died, he has shocked the entire family by leaving their huge, sprawling home in Kolkata to Lila rather than any of the three generations of family members currently living there.
Lila arranges for an eight-week leave of absence from her job despite the terrible professional timing and flies to Kolkata to attend her grandfather’s funeral and try to figure out what to do with her unexpected inheritance. Greeted by her family with a mixture of warmth and suspicion — why would the house have been left to her of all people? — Lila struggles to figure out both how she fits into this large, colorful family and what she truly needs to be happy. The magic of Nayantara Roy’s “The Magnificent Ruins” lies in the outstanding combination of a vibrant cultural setting and rich character development.
From the moment Lila finds herself torn between her mother, Maya, and her grandmother, Geeta, her first night in the house because they’ve both separately prepared her favorite Indian foods for her, Roy uses immersive descriptions of food, sounds, smells and other details to truly capture her Kolkata setting. She also skillfully develops the character of each family member until what initially seems like a completely overwhelming number of residents in the house turns into a group of people who come vividly alive on the page as distinct, complicated, lovable individuals. As Lila clashes with her relatives over her attempts to modernize the crumbling, outdated house — she sees an elevator as clearly necessary for the elderly residents, they see it as preparing the house to sell it and turn them all out on the street — and even her attempts to help pay for her cousin’s upcoming wedding, she also finds herself freshly entangled with her first love, a handsome lawyer who’s never forgotten her.
Unfortunately, he’s now married to someone else. Things get even more complicated when an author Lila has worked with in New York shows up in Kolkata with romantic ideas of his own. All the while, Lila’s alternately charming and dangerous great-uncle Hari makes it clear he will do anything necessary to contest the will and get the house back from Lila.
Lila’s life is messy, and in a less-talented author’s hands, she could easily become unsympathetic, but Roy completely avoids letting that happen. Even when Lila makes choices the reader may not agree with, it’s impossible not to root for her to get everything figured out in the end. Her relationship with her mother is especially engrossing.
We slowly learn their whole history and all the family dynamics that have helped shape their rocky mother-daughter relationship. By the novel’s end, Lila has a better understanding of why her mother made the choices she did and hurt Lila in the ways she did, and while that knowledge doesn’t erase the pain of the past, it does help create a possible path forward for the two of them. I highly recommend “The Magnificent Ruins” for anyone looking for an engrossing read with an unforgettable cast of characters and a beautifully realized setting.
Roy’s story offers both an emotionally moving storyline about family secrets and an entertaining look at a quirky large family’s response to having an “outsider” come in to shake up their lives. I’m really glad I got to know these characters and will be eagerly looking forward to Roy’s next book..
