'Guesthouse for Ganesha'—3/5

The story of Esther Grunspan is one I really wanted to enjoy, but unfortunately, it just didn't pan out that way. 'Guesthouse for Ganesha,' as a quick glance at a blurb will tell you, recounts the 22-year sojourn of Esther after arriving in Koln, Germany. As the story unspools itself, we follow her, as well as our narrator, Ganesha, through the backdrops of the rising Third Reich, the Holocaust, and the aftermath of the Second World War.

As he is the narrator, we are informed that something about Esther intrigues Ganesha: her unconscious understanding of the purpose of love. It would be wonderful if the book had really shown much of this instead of telling it to us (a recurring issue), as Esther's story doesn't live up to the awards and laurels it's received in my opinion: she is engaged to a young man who leaves her at the altar. Their relationship, despite being painted as this grand romantic story, boils down to a handful of exchanged dialogue while he buys bread for the Sabbath. As a result, she becomes cold. For over twenty years, she treats everyone around her like shit and it is continually seen as her just being "tough."

In Koln, she marries a man to ease her financial burden and has three children with him. She abandons this husband to the Holocaust without a second thought and is quite cold with her children, who are described as getting used to this treatment and learning not to expect love from their mother. It is at this point, over a decade out from the marriage that failed, that we really start to see how callous a character Esther is. It makes her difficult to become invested in as a character and also makes the premise of the novel seem inaccurate.

There is one moment of tenderness with one daughter (Tova), but the sweetness of the incident is undermined by the fact that this is from the daughter's perspective. From Esther's perspective, having to look after her sick daughter is just another trial she has to endure. Her son she takes with her, but that's only because she has no other choice and is convinced he will make her blend in easier—the daughters are dumped, allegedly on a train for England, and, up until the end of the story when they are briefly mentioned again, I had the sinking feeling she'd let them be sent to a concentration camp. Thankfully, that does not happen, as they are instead dumped in a British orphanage—and if a childhood reading of Dickens has taught me nothing else, it's that British orphanages are a wonderful and caring place for deadbeat parents to leave their children.

Toward the end of the book, after all her trials are finished and the war is over, she also abandons her son and finds out that, with two exceptions, her entire family has been murdered in the Holocaust. Some other reviews I've read paint this as a particularly powerful section of the book, but I found it to be a difficult and, frankly, rather disrespectful reflection that shows a lack of growth throughout the novel. Esther as a character does not seem to grow. She begins with the talents she needs to survive. She begins hardened, so the setting of the Holocaust does not harden her up as you might expect. It doesn't help that when she is visited by a string of Holocaust victims, including her beloved from around two decades prior, there is no true sense of growth and instead that static aspect of the character is, again, reflected: these spirits and ghosts seem to be coming to tell her that she hasn't done anything wrong, how strong she was, etc., and it seems almost like a Mary Sue moment that detracts from the story. 

As much as I understand the 'mysterious' aspect of magic-realism, when I put down the book at the end, I still struggled to get why Ganesha picked the protagonist (and no, the fourth-wall breaking scene of Ganesha speaking directly to the reader was unsatisfying in this regard; additionally, the sprinkling throughout the story of Ganesha's narration rather quickly went from a fun little excursion to, "Yes, an... unexpected... little... good... thing happened, I don't... need... a paragraph... or two... filled with... ah... ellipses, the most loving and... discursive... of writing tools... which... hmmm... will allow one to... wander... over the fields and... plains... of thought without needing to... be concerned... it looks mysterious and intriguing... after all, does it not...? And it allows me... to pretend that... hmmm... my half-formed ideas are dripping with unplumbed fathoms... of meaning...")

But more important is the above mention I made of the Holocaust and what I view to be as its rather flippant and disrespectful treatment. It is mentioned throughout the book, but other than sprinkling in the words "darkness," "horror," and a reference to ash at one point, there really isn't much of a depth or grappling with the atrocities. The moments with departed ghosts telling her how much stronger and smarter she was almost seemed to reflect a view of Holocaust victims as not being "strong enough," a view that, as Timothy Snyder points out in his phenomenal but very troubling Black Earth, is not accurate. Chance played as much, or more, a role in survival than just being tough and pretending to be a Catholic (which, contrary to the claim in *Ganesha* that this is an ingenious ploy: yes, other Jewish people in Germany thought of this and still fell victim to the Holocaust; pretending to be Catholic was not a 'Get Out of Auschwitz Free' card as the snippet toward the end where Ganesha gushes would imply).

Additionally, and most troubling of all, is the melding of Hindu and Jewish cultures—there's nothing wrong with syncretism. However, the use of the Hindu theme of "suffering isn't real" set against the backdrop of the Holocaust is not something to dabble in. That is the kind of paradoxical conception that a genius-level author at the peak of their abilities would struggle to be able to respectfully interweave; it is not the kind of topic to tackle for a debut novel. It leads to the protagonist coming across as not quite satisfying as a character, as so much of her identity has been consumed by symbolism—and magic-realism isn't an easy genre to dabble with in the first place!

Nor does it help that Ganesha serves as little more than a bland figure. I can't recall any references to any of Ganesha's myths, and there's a wide variety of them that could have been used metaphorically, allegorically, or allusively. From his cracked horn coming from hurling it at the mocking moon, to eating a sumptuous feast and demanding more to make an example of greed, to Shiva essentially shrugging and telling another deity he has no control over him, to his very creation: originally a boy created by and Parvati and assigned to guard her bath, allowing no one through. When Shiva shows up demanding entrance cause he's her husband, the then-boy tells him no, these are his orders, so Shiva chops off his head—and when his wife is distraught, he has his guys find the first head they can—an elephant, and slap it on there.

Not awful, and thank God it wasn't Michael Gruber's The Book of Air and Shadows with a bunch of random sexual tangents and creepy male characters salivating like rabid dogs whenever a woman walks into the room, but also not at all what I envisioned/hoped. Still, you have to respect the amount of work, dedication, and guts that it takes to both write and publish a novel.

On the front of recent magic-realist reading, I would have to say Isabel Allende's The House of Spirits comes out far ahead and the way it approaches Chilean history and the brutality of the Allende regime gives an example of how to portray the progression of world events within the context of writing magic-realism.