Bee Season

Reviewed by Linda L. Richards

While Amulya Malladi’s five novels have not had huge pushes behind them, they have been wonderful is their consistancy and the largesse of the vision that drove them. The author gives every impression of building a solid and passionate following.

Malladi is a wonderful writer. More: she’s not only a great storyteller, she seems to always have something to say. Consistantly. And her background and her interests and the things she seems to care very deeply about fall in line with the backstory of our times. She has a finger on the contemporary cosmopolitan pulse and together with a talent that is not slight, she weaves all these disparate things into stories that almost anyone will care about.

Her most recent novel, The Sound of Language, illustrates all of these points. In the novel, the Afghani Raihana escapes Kabul to stay with relatives in Denmark, a country that is as damp and cold as Afghanistan can be sunny and warm. In fact, everything is foreign to her, everything tears at her heart. Even the sound of the Danish language which, to Raihana’s ears, sounds like the buzzing of her uncle’s bees.

Raihana couldn’t even comprehend how she would learn a language that sounded like buzzing bees. There didn’t seem to be any substance to it, just froth lolling out of everyone’s mouth.

And the differences she finds go far beyond the language. The Danes, Raihana decides, are “different from what she had imagined. They were not all tall and fair and beautiful, some of them were short and ugly. And they mumbled when they spoke. The standing joke, Layla had told her, was that they spoke like they had hot potatoes in their mouths and Raihana agreed.”

Raihana connects with an elderly Dane named Gunnar. Gunnar has been left widowed and he needs help looking after the bees that were in his wife’s charge. That is, left to Gunnar, the bees will die. They were not his department. Over the course of a summer of Raihana’s keeping of Gunnar’s bees, the pair forge an unlikely relationship, one that gives both of them solace from their separate heartbreaks, but that their friends and relatives find impossible to stomach.

The Sound of Language is an almost impossibly beautiful book. The coolness of the Danish landscape, juxtaposed against the heat of the immigrant’s heart. Raihana is a stranger in a strange land, of course. But with his own actions and the choices he has made, Gunnar has become almost as much of a stranger as Raihana. And, as seems always to be the case with the very best of this sort of tale, while we begin seeing everything that is different, before very long, we see all that is the same. And not all of those commonalities are good.

Author Mulladi knows these roads. Born and raised in India, she has an engineering degree and worked in Silicon Valley for several years. Though they met and and married in California, Mulladi and her husband, the Dane Søren Rasmussen, moved to Copenhagen from the United States in 2002. In a reading group guide published with the book, Mulladi says she didn’t think that living in Denmark would be much different than living in the United States had been. “Needless to say,” Mulladi writes, “I was wrong.” | January 2008

Linda L. Richards is the editor of January Magazine and a contributor to The Rap Sheet. Her fourth novel, Death Was the Other Woman, is published by St. Martin’s Minotaur/Thomas Dunne Books.