NOT SINCE VS Naipaul’s official biography, The World Is What It Is, has the genre of memoir been gifted a book like Ira Mathur’s Love the Dark Days, a work so candid the reader wonders whether it is perhaps too candid.
From cover to cover, and at all points in between, the reader of Love the Dark Days is prompted to expect great things. Mathur’s Trini Brit colleagues lead off that process and in procession. The front-cover blurb under the title from Costa prize-winning author Monique Roffey declares Love the Dark Days a “blaze of a book. Exquisite. Astonishing… Nothing like this has torn itself out of the Caribbean.”
On the back cover, Amanda Smyth, author of the excellent Fortune, speaks of Mathur’s memoir “burning through her days, reckless, raw, passionate… An exquisite, compassionate and necessary book.” The poet Vahni (Anthony Ezekiel) Capildeo welcomes Mathur finally putting “something of her beauty, wisdom and pain into print. Here it is. Stranger and more compelling than any fantasy, here we are.”
TT’s leading living writer, Earl Lovelace (relegated to the inside front cover) calls Love the Dark Days “a compelling memoir of the binding power of love and the liberating beauty of forgiveness.”
But Mathur does more in the book to require notice than her well-qualified and well-meaning writer friends’ blurbs.
Apart from one seeming flaw, the book is remarkably well structured (even if the following sentence describing it is not). A tale that begins in India and unfurls across the globe would have to be. The torturous Indian childhood, ignored (at best) by two generations of mothers caring more about one’s springboard into society than one’s bored offspring is connected to the chilling end, the consequences of accepting motherhood that neither one’s parent nor grandparent risked, by the small strands of the grownup, finished and accomplished writer, in St Lucia, in the shadow of the Nobel laureate, Derek Walcott, mashing up his stove and his memory and finally asserting herself… if only in these small links that may go unnoticed and unappreciated. Indeed, the reader has to go back to these interludes at the end of the story to appreciate how well they work to connect the book in the hand of the reader to the voice of the writer. “Remarkable” might be too weak a word; “enviable” might be better.
[caption id="attachment_990414" align="alignnone" width="670"] The cover of Ira Mathur's Love the Dark Days. -[/caption]
The only flaw in the structure is the final chapter, which even literally reads like an oversight, since it's titled “chapter 27” – the same number assigned to the chapter immediately preceding.
The book is scathingly honest, even if the most scathed person in the tale is its writer. The reader veers between deep sympathy for the author and, at least once or twice, when the advantage taken of her is so very great, something approaching annoyance – before it dissolves into an appreciation of the skill required to turn this material into something genuine and genuinely readable. Ira Math
