Manhattan Music: A Novel

by Meena Alexander

Sandhya Rosenblum, an immigrant from India married to an American Jewish man, tries to make sense of her life in a time of turbulence. In this sweeping novel set in Manhattan and India, Alexander lyrically and poignantly explores crossing borders, the Indian diaspora, fanaticism, ethnic intolerance, interracial affairs and marriages, and what it means to be an American today.

Genres: Fiction, Asian American

231 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1996

About the author

Meena Alexander was an internationally acclaimed poet, scholar, and writer. Born in Allahabad, India, and raised in India and Sudan, Alexander lived and worked in New York City, where she was Distinguished Professor of English at Hunter College and at the CUNY Graduate Center in the PhD program in English. She was the author of numerous collections of poetry, literary memoirs, essays, and works of fiction and literary criticism.

(from Wikipedia)

Reviews

[Lisa]

I’m not sure I even finished Chapter 1. The writing just didn’t grab me. Did not rate but I guess that essentially means I gave it zero stars.

[Manjari Shukla · Rating 4 out of 5]

Memory in Alexander’s writing assumes a distinctive role as a trope for performance of immigrant identity. She demonstrates how the body becomes instrumental in identifying useful memory and its relation to the ever changing immigrant identity. On reading the novel Manhattan Music, it is observed that how memories are symptomatically conjoined with the body. Anzaldua’s observation of a mestiza conforms to what Alexander narrates in Manhattan Music. Through mestiza, Anzaldua meant someone not belonging to any one specific category but an intertwining of various ranges.
Like a drifting spirit, Sandhya the protagonist throughout the narrative tries figuring out who she is, where she belongs to and how she should cope up with the current situation. The female body in the novel brings to the fore all the concerns related to migration, multiplicity of homes, memories etc. The concept of plural personality and juggling of cultures is observed.
The various dimensions of gender, culture and migration which transforms a woman; and how a search for identity to know all about herself brings forth new parameters of a diasporic woman’s self is the crux of this text.

[Laura Crampton · Rating 1 out of 5]

Sandhya's lover doesn't want to live with her, so she tries to hang herself. she spends weeks away from home, recovering with Sakhi, then realizes yes, she actually wants to be a mom. and she wants to live out the rest of her life in America.

[Stephen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Manhattan Music is really an underrated novel. I believe that fans of free indirect discourse as utilized most effectively in the writings of Virginia Woolf would find Meena Alexander's novel quite rich and compelling. It also has an interesting relationship between an Arab American and a South Asian American character that prefigures in some ways the more fervent "eastern" boundaries of Asian America in light of post 9/11 re-racialization. I taught this book once for a course and found my students had quite a bit of trouble with it, but I still find it compelling and am a big fan of Meena Alexander's work overall. I need to finish Shock of Arrival! Bad me!