My Beloved Life

A novel

An absorbing, exceptionally moving novel that traces the arc of a man’s life, an ordinary life made exceptional by the fact that he has loved and has been loved in turn

Jadunath Kunwar’s beginnings are humble, even inauspicious. In 1935 in a village near George Orwell’s birthplace, Jadu’s mother, while pregnant with him, nearly dies from a cobra bite. When we see Jadu again, he is in college, meeting the Sherpa who first summited Everest and wondering what it means to be modern. As his life skates between the mythical and the mundane, and as changes big and small sweep across India, Jadu finds meaning in the most unexpected places. He befriends poets and politicians. He becomes a historian. And he has a daughter, Jugnu, a television journalist with a career in the United States—whose own story recasts the past in a new light. Piercing, fleet-footed, and undeniably resonant, here is a novel from a singularly gifted writer about how we tell stories and write history, how individuals play a counterpoint to big movements, how no single life is without consequence.

Profoundly moving

I loved this novel for the way it tells the story of multiple generations—between Bihar, Berkeley, and Atlanta—from their own personal points of view. The book delves deeply into the many facets of these lives, including poverty, aspirations, relationships, colonialism/independence, education, romance, class/caste, mobility, discrimination, Covid, death and mourning. Kumar interweaves the individual stories in a way that recalls Faulkner, capturing the instability of experience, memory, time, and perspective. The novel’s vivid imagery and historical detail also gives readers a sense of the profound social, cultural, economic, and political changes in India (and the US) over the past century, especially since the 1950s. Kumar’s warm, expressive narration for the audiobook adds to the deeply personal quality of the story and kept me engaged, even to the point of tears at times, to the very end.