Title: The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing Author: Mira Jacob
Published: July 1, 2014
Genre(s): Literary Fiction
Page Count: 512
Rating:
Summary from Goodreads:Spanning India in the 70s to New Mexico in the 80s to Seattle in the 90s, The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing is a winning, irreverent debut novel about a family wrestling with its future and its past.
When brain surgeon Thomas Eapen decides to cut short a visit to his mother's home in India in 1979, he sets into motion a series of events that will forever haunt him and his wife, Kamala; their intellectually precocious son, Akhil; and their watchful daughter, Amina. Now, twenty years later, in the heat of a New Mexican summer, Thomas has begun having bizarre conversations with his dead relatives and it's up to Amina-a photographer in the midst of her own career crisis-to figure out what is really going on. But getting to the truth is far harder than it seems. From Thomas's unwillingness to talk, to Kamala's Born Again convictions, to run-ins with a hospital staff that seems to know much more than they let on, Amina finds herself at the center of a mystery so thick with disasters that to make any headway at all, she has to unravel the family's painful past.
I love long books (where the length feels justified) and I love books that focus on a family. The Sleepwalker’s Guide to Dancing, a literary debut by Mira Jacob, is both. It’s about Amina Eapen, a first-generation American and the large, makeshift family she’s formed among other Indian immigrants in Albuquerque. The book alternates between different crises in Amina’s life, one involving her older brother, Akhil, and one involving her father. As I said, it’s a longish book (500 pages), and I loved the way Jacob was able to offer a complete picture of Amina’s character and surroundings without ever letting the plot go stagnant—this is a surprisingly quick read for all it’s length. I didn’t expect it, but this novel is compelling and truthful without ever delving into the realm of the pretentious.
Though honestly, shortly after I started reading The Sleepwalker’s Guide to Dancing, I felt that I’d made a terrible mistake. The first 100 pages or so take place primarily in India, and paint a portrait of the Eapen family at their most dysfunctional, most unhappy, and most chaotic. I’m all for stories about families—in fact, they’re some of my favorites. However, I honestly couldn’t imagine spending 500 pages with a group of characters I didn’t like and who didn’t seem to like each other at all. But though these initial scenes are important in setting up the story and its later conflicts, I also don’t think they are wholly representative of the Eapens and the story Mira Jacob ultimately chooses to tell.
The majority of the book is about family and loss and grief. What happened in India with the “original sleepwalker” at the beginning of the book comes to haunt the Eapens, as does Akhil’s sleepwalking and then, eventually, Amina’s father’s. Though sometimes the themes of sleeping and dreaming that Jacob introduced felt a bit fantastic, I felt they were grounded by the emotion that Amina and her family felt relating to each tragedy.
I don’t want to lie and say The Sleepwalker’s Guide to Dancing is a fun, joyous book. It’s not. However, I think the author has really captured the ins and outs of families in a way that any reader can recognize and identify with. Though the family situation back in India was genuinely awful, the branch of Eapens in the US is genuinely caring and well-intentioned, though not always the best at communicating or getting along. I really, really enjoyed that aspect of the text, and how Amina herself fit into her family and seemed to recognize the beauty in all the mess.
This book is perfect for people who like family dysfunction and immigrant stories and a compelling slice-of-life-style narrative. Though it took Mira Jacob 10 years to write The Sleepwalker’s Guide to Dancing, I do hope that her next novel comes out much sooner. This was a very, very strong novel and I was truly surprised by how much I enjoyed it, considering my first impression.
