A Closer Look at Mayu: The Life of a Finnish Woman

      
  

A novel by Shahzad Rizvi

Summary

Mayu both loves and loathes her father. She hates his alcoholic rages, how he abuses her mother and abandons the family. But his talk of social justice kindles her imagination and fills her heart with passion. She vows to defy her mother’s acquiescent example in her own life. 

As she grows up, Mayu’s intelligence and hard work propel her forward. At the same time, she is disappointed over and over in her relationships. As her career takes her around the world, she encounters a wide variety of men who both attract and repel her. She marries an American, but his incessant womanizing drives them apart, and she finds herself the lonely single mother of two boys.

She meets a sincere Indian American, and she and he link up romantically. But Mayu’s emotional baggage, her messy domestic life, and the yawning cultural chasm between her and her Indian lover run like treacherous emotional fault-lines under the affair. Mayu’s intense desire for meaningful connection is at constant odds with her critical, skeptical independence. 

Commentary

This novel’s depiction of a modern woman’s life and struggles feels instantly and painfully authentic. Mayu juggles not only a career, but a defiant teenage son, a house full of dog hair, and those extra pounds that refuse to budge. There is solid home truth in the book’s portrayal of romantic relationships, especially the compromises that are required between couples, and the times when such compromises seem too difficult to undertake or sustain. 

Mayu is particularly effective at showing the strains that can develop in cross-cultural relationships, when each member of a couple has implicit expectations for how the other partner should behave, yet must continually confront the reality that these expectations are unlikely to be met.

The novel is told in three different voices: the narrator’s, Mayu’s, and her Indian lover Shamim’s. This allows the reader to get inside the perspectives of each character and how they see each other. Time shifts, too, within the story, but the reader is always clear on who is speaking and when. Mayu’s distinctive skeptical voice is one of the novel’s greatest strengths.

Mayu is also interesting in how it depicts the immigrant experience. Mayu and Shamim are both newcomers to the United States. Just as couple relationships require constant readjustment of expectations, so, by analogy, does living in a new land. There are pleasant adjustments, of course, but a subtle sense of loss and unease often undergirds daily life, although it is rarely acknowledged or expressed. This book describes the immigrant’s emotional burden with unusual sensitivity and insight. 

Book Details

Volume: 248 pages
Publisher: Wordclay (Jan 2011)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1604818360
ISBN-13: 978-1604818369
Dimensions: 6 x 9 x 0.6 inches
Editions: Kindle, Nook & Paperback

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