Rating: 
Summary: terrible
Review: this is the story of a young indian boy trapped in a dysfunctional indian family who travels to america to study and ends up an exchange student in the house of a dysfunctional american family. the story raises questions of nationality versus human nature, the loneliness of the human soul, and the search for affection in a world devoid of love.while the story itself may have worked, it's written in a boring, almost expository manner. desai doesn't spend time developing her characters and they come across as flat. they seem puppets in a play rather than people. the novel is extremely plot driven and jam packed with too many issues and too little exploration. i would rather have a simple story and a world of breathing, true to life characters than a story filled with issues and characters that don't emote. this book gave me a good look at how not to write prose.
Rating: 
Summary: I Can't Believe this is Booker
Review: This was my first and last Desai book. I can't imagine what the Booker committee was thinking. The Fasting part was mildly interesting, although it did leave one wondering what motivated the various characters. The Feasting half simply beggared belief. The characterization was so silly and shallow I often re-read passages in disbelief to confirm my mind wasn't playing cruel literary tricks on me. Give this book a pass - it is a huge disappointment.
Rating: 
Summary: The Thin Line between Feasting and Fasting
Review: This was the first book I've read by Desai, and I'm a fan! Desai demonstrates the thin line between fasting and feasting in this novel. Rather than divide the book between two "halves," she combines both and contrasts the hording mentality of Arun's host mother with the obsessive weight control programs by his host siblings. In the land of plenty, and a stocked freezer, daughter Melanie has an easily recognizable eating disorder. Her brother, however, also works out incessantly to keep himself in shape. In the first part of the book, which is set in India, food takes a back burner and emotions take the front. In the second half, it is just the opposite. Desai exposes the depth (or lack of) of Indian and American society, and does so artfully. This book is not fast-paced or plot-centered, but is rather crafty, reflective, and telling.
Rating:
Summary: The Thin Line between Feasting and Fasting
Review: This was the first book I've read by Desai, and I'm a fan! Desai demonstrates the thin line between fasting and feasting in this novel. Rather than divide the book between two "halves," she combines both and contrasts the hording mentality of Arun's host mother with the obsessive weight control programs by his host siblings. In the land of plenty, and a stocked freezer, daughter Melanie has an easily recognizable eating disorder. Her brother, however, also works out incessantly to keep himself in shape. In the first part of the book, which is set in India, food takes a back burner and emotions take the front. In the second half, it is just the opposite. Desai exposes the depth (or lack of) of Indian and American society, and does so artfully. This book is not fast-paced or plot-centered, but is rather crafty, reflective, and telling.
Rating:
Summary: Definitely more Fasting than Feasting!
Review: Very disappointing work from one of my favourite authors. Minimal character development, hardly any plot to speak of, stereotypical in the extreme, 'Fasting, Feasting' is a very pale reflection of the earlier (and stupendous) 'Clear Light of Day'. The attempt to juxtapose an eastern family dynamic versus a western one, without fully exploring either, came off as forced and disjointed ..and left each narrative feeling incomplete and unfulfilling to the reader.
Rating:
Summary: Same the world over?
Review: We like our stories to have tidy endings, our characters to develop and go somewhere, so the frustration some previous reviewers felt with this novel is maybe understandable. If there was a category called "fictionalised essay" this luminously observed contrast between the Eastern and the Western ways of family life would slot right into it. People don't always change or rebel against their circumstances - in fact the reverse is more typical, because we assume our way of living is the obvious and only one. It takes an outsider to shake that conviction. Uma's a hard character to keep sympathy with - her passivity, though culturally conditioned, is infuriating. But Desai builds up a compelling picture of the way that the treatment she suffers at the hands of her parents is sanctioned and backed up by an entire culture - whilst the extreme traditionalism of her parents is maybe no longer typical of Indian family life, the importance placed on extended family relationships and the submissiveness of women are still deeply ingrained. But this book isn't just a polemic - just as we are seething with rage at the appalling fate of Desai's females and thanking our lucky stars we don't have to live in such a society, we escape with relief to the West and find the mirror turned back onto our own lifestyles. And the reflection is none too flattering. Okay, so we don't sell women in demeaning marriages or enslave our children, but is the other extreme any better? The American home where dad defines his role by cooking barbecues nobody wants and then getting mad at them, where the mother aimlessly cruises the supermarket aisles whilst her teenage daughter's bulimia goes unnoticed, and the family never eats together - as a parent I recognised much of this portrait with a squirm of unease. Desai doesn't judge - it's an exercise in compare and contrast. We are left to draw our own conclusions. The final scene completes the circle, as we see Arun's American surrogate mother on the porch swing in a scene reminiscent of the opening of the book, flanked by the unwanted family gifts that Arun has offloaded onto her, their intended meaning lost in translation. The solutions differ - the difficulties are strikingly similar.
Rating:
Summary: Classic literature.
Review: Yes, yes, Anita Desai does it again. The words are simple and precise, but the world weaved through them is profound and sad. The narrative is restrained. The characters are restrained. But the reader can be anything but.
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