Sameer Gudhate Presents the Book Review of The Far Field by Madhuri Vijay

There are some books that don’t just tell a story — they unspool a silence you’ve been carrying within yourself. The Far Field by Madhuri Vijay is one of them. I remember reading it late one evening, the rain tapping against my window like a nervous confession. By the time I closed the book, I wasn’t sure whether it was the rain outside or the one that had started within me.

Madhuri Vijay, in her debut, doesn’t announce herself with fireworks. She arrives like mist — quietly, almost invisibly — and before you realize, you’re drenched. Winner of the JCB Prize for Literature 2019, The Far Field is part coming-of-age tale, part political meditation, and entirely a human story that pulses with loss, guilt, and the slow, haunting ache of privilege.

At its heart is Shalini — young, privileged, restless, and naively determined to find meaning after her mother’s death. She sets out from Bangalore to a remote Kashmiri village, hoping to find Bashir Ahmed, a salesman who once brought color into her otherwise gray childhood. But the journey she takes is less about geography and more about emotional cartography — tracing fault lines between class and compassion, ignorance and empathy, safety and survival. Vijay never turns this into a grand adventure; instead, it’s an inward pilgrimage into the blurred borders of grief and moral blindness.

The writing? Oh, it’s exquisite — clean, deliberate, and sharp enough to draw blood when you least expect it. There’s a stillness in her prose that mirrors the snow-laden landscape of Kashmir, yet every line hums with quiet electricity. Her sentences build like mountain paths — winding, patient, deceptively simple — and before you know it, you’re standing at a height where the air feels thin and your heart, a little heavier. She writes not just what things look like but what they feel like. You can almost hear the crackle of firewood, the weight of silence between Shalini and her mother, the rustle of distant conflict pressing against domestic calm.

What makes this book unforgettable, though, isn’t the setting — it’s the people. Shalini’s mother, volatile yet strangely magnetic, lingers in your mind like the aftertaste of something bitter-sweet. Her loneliness, her bouts of rage, her silences — all speak to the unspoken epidemic of unhealed mental anguish that seeps through generations. And Shalini herself — messy, entitled, yet heartbreakingly sincere — mirrors the urban, well-meaning Indian who drifts into spaces of suffering thinking empathy alone can save the world. It’s uncomfortable. It’s human. And it’s true.

The story moves between Bangalore’s concrete distance and Kashmir’s fragile beauty, and Vijay uses this duality to talk about privilege — who gets to “choose” empathy and who must live it. Her use of flashbacks gives the narrative a haunting rhythm, like waves that keep returning to the same shore but leave behind different shells each time.

Reading The Far Field felt, to me, like standing in front of a mirror that reflected not my face, but the faces I’ve overlooked — the people whose pain I’ve intellectualized rather than understood. There’s a moment in the book where Shalini realizes that her good intentions have caused harm, and it hit me hard. How often do we confuse helping with healing? How often do we, from our safe distances, romanticize the very struggles we fail to comprehend?

If there’s a flaw, it’s that the pacing occasionally drifts — certain sections meander like a lazy river when you wish it would rush. But maybe that’s the point. Grief rarely moves in straight lines. Neither does self-awareness.

By the end, Vijay doesn’t offer tidy resolutions. She leaves you with the taste of smoke, the echo of snow, and the heavy awareness that sometimes love and guilt are two sides of the same worn coin. The Far Field isn’t a book you “finish.” It’s one you carry — like a secret you didn’t know you were keeping.

If you’ve ever lost someone, questioned your own privilege, or found yourself trying to piece together meaning from broken memories, this book will meet you there — quietly, honestly, devastatingly.

Pick it up on a slow evening. Let it unsettle you. Some silences deserve to be heard.

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