My Blue Skin Lover

by Monona Wali

SHIVA is the Hindu god of life and death, of destruction and rebirth. He is terrifying and he is benevolent. He has three eyes through which he can view the past, the present, and the future. The third eye looks inward. If he were to open it, the searing heat would scorch all of creation. One autumn night Shiva slips into the bedroom of 32-year old Anjali Mehta, and triggers an erotic and dangerous dissembling of her marriage and her life. Anjali is a seeker in a world of material overdose, and her fantastical affair with the divine blue skin lover raises questions about her identity that force her to take control of her life and confront her deepest self. Set in New York City, My Blue Skin Lover is one woman's headlong journey into spiritual transformation. Monona Wali is a short story writer and novelist, and an award-winning documentary filmmaker and screenwriter. Her stories have been published in The Santa Monica Review, Stone Canoe, Tiferet, Catamaran, A Journal of South Asian American Literature and other literary journals. She was born in Benares, India and immigrated to the United States with her family as a young child. She lives in Los Angeles, California and teaches creative writing at Santa Monica College and volunteers with InsideOut Writers, an organization that offers writing classes for incarcerated youth.

262 pages, Paperback

First published May 21, 2014

Reviews

[Janet · Rating 5 out of 5]

In this small, lovely book, a woman, Anjali, a Columbia PhD candidate and devoted wife, finds an unimaginable spiritual life opening up for her during a random occurrence, the heart attack of a street vendor on the upper West Side of New York. This book is unpredictable to the very end, centered around a topic rarely seen in contemporary literature--the disruption that a true spiritual awakening can cause in an everyday life. Monona Wali's depiction of American East Indians is a special pleasure, and this fine debut novel's treatment of the stresses of academic life and upwardly mobile marriage is spot on. Her treatement of the possibility of spirituality erupting into the quotidian is right on the edge of magical realism, but seems more like a realistic description of what such a spiritual experience could be.

I'm reading this in an exquisite edition, on watercolor paper with a raw rough edge, a beautiful object to hold. I gather this was a small first edition--probably still available--after which there will be a standard paperback.

[Betsy · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is about a woman's spiritual struggle in a very real world. Her quest swept me up, even as I enjoyed reading the vivid details of her New York life. Fascinating, riveting, and lush, this book braids the material and the spiritual worlds, in all their complexity.

[Amanda [Novel Addiction] · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well now I feel like I have to look more into Hinduism because this book was fascinating.

[Robert Morgan Fisher · Rating 5 out of 5]

This very well written novel moves at a clip and weaves Hindu spiritual and erotic themes with modern day Wall Street and the deepest canyons of academia (dead languages). Yes, you read that right. Never straying into sentimentality, Wali keeps the story on an unpredictable track with moments of pure poetry and concise headlong prose.

[MJ Austin · Rating 5 out of 5]

My cousin wrote this book - I read it without stopping.

[Suraj Alva · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the second self published book I've ever bought. Didn't know when buying that it was self-published.

I found the author through a story she published in the critically acclaimed Santa Monica Review. She is a regular contributor there, sort of.

The book won the IPPY award (Independent Publishers) for the best 'multicultural book', which sounds odd or even orientalist, no?

The language is accessible and the latter half of the book is a page turner. You rarely encounter this in literary fiction.

The story is about an Indian-American woman who resides in New York. She is a PhD candidate and married to a Wall Street guy. An ideal life for most women, I assume.

Yet, she hates her it. She rarely sees her husband. He and her have different values. And her dissertation advisor is a dick.

Like any book, it has flaws. But two things stand out: the deterioration of the marriage could be more detailed and the excerpts from Sanskrit poetry could be more illuminating, interesting.

Overall, an accomplished debut.

[Dona Bolding · Rating 5 out of 5]

Anjali is a modern-day hero, a Sanskrit scholar who pursues divine passion with Shiva, her "Blue Skin Lover," in spite of/or perhaps because of the flattening world of her Manhattan marriage and the dulling-down of academia. A page-turner, I couldn't put the book down. I had to know where this religious ecstasy would lead her. Highly recommended.

[Sunday Dutro · Rating 4 out of 5]

A medium-paced fiction with touches of magical realism. A book about spiritual transformation told through a romance with Shiva, it’s an interesting glance into Hinduism with some unexpected spice.

[Chris Keele · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a wonderful story about a woman who, on the surface, seems to have it all: a successful husband, a promising career in academia, and material comfort. But her gradual spiritual awakening conflicts with all that, and the changes she undergoes made me wonder at times if she was becoming closer to her god or descending into madness. That tension propelled me forward in the novel, eager to see where the story took me with the narrator.

The writing is marvelous, often humorous, and always profound in its insight into the narrator's conflicts in her marriage, her professional relationships, and her inner turmoil. On another level, it illustrated the beauty of Hinduism and Shiva, using ancient poetry and stories to further enhance this modern story.

I would highly recommend this book to anyone, and look forward to reading it again.

[Maxine Nunes · Rating 4 out of 5]

Monona Wali has written a wonderful story about a woman who, on the surface, seems to have it all: a successful husband, a promising career in academia, and material comfort. But her gradual spiritual awakening conflicts with all that, and the changes she undergoes made me wonder at times if she was becoming closer to her god or descending into madness. That tension propelled me forward in the novel, eager to see where the story took me with the narrator.

The writing is marvelous, often humorous, and always profound in its insight into the narrator's conflicts in her marriage, her professional relationships, and her inner turmoil. On another level, it illustrated the beauty of Hinduism and Shiva, using ancient poetry and stories to further enhance this modern story.

I would highly recommend this book to anyone, and look forward to reading it again.

[Tammi Burris]

I didn't read this book.