Author:
• Saturday, October 24th, 2009

Abha Dawesar was born in New Delhi, India, in 1974. She obtained a degree in philosophy from Harvard University and started a career in finance which she had to forgo when her two novels, Miniplanner and Babyji became great successes.

Abha Dawesar received the Lambda Literary Award in 2005 and the American Library Association’s Stonewall Award in 2006. She was also awarded a Fiction Fellowship in 2000 by the New York foundation of the Arts. Abha Dawesar lives in New York.

Due to her young age, her bibliography is short, but acclaimed by critics.
She published Miniplanner in 2000.
Her second novel Babyji was published in 2005.
That Summer in Paris was published in 2006.
Family Values was published in 2009.

Abha Dawesar is a self taught video maker and a visual artist. Her photographs have been exhibited in New York City.

That Summer in Paris is the story of a successful, Nobel prize winner, seventy five-year-old Indian writer, Prem Rustum who discovers that his life is nearly over without him seeing the years passing. He realises that he has spent too much time writing novels. In spite of his old age he hasn’t given up on love and decides to rest his pen and enjoy the few years left for him to live, preferably with a charming female soul mate.

Searching on Internet under his name, he discovers unexpectedly messages from one of his admirers, Maya; an intellectual, ambitious, twenty five year old aspiring writer, who admits openly on the web her admiration and passion for his work. He decides to meet her. They felt captivated by each other’s charm straight away and on a whim Prem decides to follow Maya, from New York to Paris, where she has a writing fellowship. The unconventional, uneasy relationship between the two main characters begins.

Prem’s love for Maya will make him reminisce over his old incestuous love with his older sister Meher, to his sensual experience with the two sixteen-year old French girls and will confront him with his rekindled desires and his approaching mortality. The theme of life and death mentioned in the novel, is a subject which Dawesar is obsessed with, as she mentioned it in one of her interviews.

For the romance to take place the author couldn’t have chosen a better clichéd place than Paris, the most beautiful and romantic city in the world, which Dawesar is very found of and visits often. The very meticulous description of the people, the paintings, the city’s streets, restaurants and French gastronomy, the various attractions and art galleries, transports the readers into a different world of romantic fantasy, but also a meditation about ageing, passion, achievement, literature and art.

The detailed and explicit descriptions of the sex scenes are gratuitous, perverse and crude, it undermines an otherwise good story about lost love, relationships and the beauty of how art can influence love and love, art. Which promotes the immortality of real love and genuine art. In her endeavour to sex-up her story, Dawesar belittles the interesting and numerous discussions between Prem, his Parisian friend, Pascal Boutin, the famous novelist and Maya his muse.

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Category: Book Reviews
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