Variations (Night Heron)
Variations was the first public working title of my first novel. This title came from the structure of the novel. The current title is Night Heron. It could just as easily be Vagabond, No.
When I started this novel, I wanted to write about a woman’s development into an artist. My first protagonist was someone like me, but not me. As I wrote the first chapter, over many months, I realized that my first protagonist, like me, had genealogies that could not simply be spoken as memories and stories. This led to my second protagonist, whose story forms a lower layer of what I saw as a necessary palimpsest. So I wrote my novel alternating one story and the other.
I gave my “beta-readers,” from the United States, Germany, and India, the full manuscript in the alternating-chapter form. Their feedback led me to think more deeply about how to convey variation in a sequenced expression. I talked to a Western classical pianist friend, Erica Poole, who told me about a recital in which the pianist played a Rachmaninov Etude after Julia Wolfe’s “Earring.” These specific pieces, with this specific sequencing, were key to helping me sense, and think about, the non-linear coherence of sequential variation in my novel.
So, if you have my manuscript (or book!) I encourage you to listen to the two pieces below as a prelude to the novel.
Prelude
1. Earring, by Julia Wolfe, played by Thalia Myers
2. Etude Tableau in A Minor, Opus 39, No. 2, by Sergei Rachmaninov, played by Vladimir Ashkenazy
Erica Poole introduced Meenakshi Chakraverti to these pieces and this sequencing. Ms. Poole heard Conrad Tao play these pieces in this astoundingly brilliant order at the Aspen Music Festival in 2014.
SYNOPSIS
Variations/Night Heron is about two women, both mothers, an artist in the early 21st century and a writer in the late 19th century, who flinch from the jubilation of full engagement with artistic effort and yet are driven to risk deeper engagement. Each ends up touching the joy of artistic creation and bearing its costs. Their interleaved stories explore independence, loneliness, death, and art, amidst larger narratives of political conflict and social change across four continents.
Pakhi, a Bengali-American artist and international consultant with a busy internal life of images, words, and memories, breaks her routine of parenting, art, and internet-mediated work to embark on a journey that takes her through New York, Berlin, and Bujumbura. Her story is interleaved with the story of a nineteenth-century Bengali woman, Mrinalini.
Mrinalini lives a mostly sequestered life in a Bengali joint family that has settled in the declining courtly city of Lucknow, far away from Bengal. Educated and literate in three languages, she is frustrated by the limitations of her thinking and words. She travels to her village of origin in Bengal for a major festival, suffers a great loss, and returns a changed woman.
As each woman grapples with choices involving obligation, love, and art, the palimpsests and genealogies that surface in their stories reveal, as in any human life, a connected and expansive narrative.
My blog posts about Night Heron
Mrinalini Through A Hegelian Veil
Mother Agonistes
WHAT READERS SAY ABOUT NIGHT HERON/VARIATIONS
Your novel captures the essence of LONGING - on one hand, the need to feel and be part of the security of “home”; on the other hand, the longing to develop oneself into a fuller person, even if that means breaking with everything that people around you expect of you. That second part is the true driver of the novel for me - I love the ways your two central characters in the parallel stories are searching, longing, exploring, reaching … trying to find themselves while being burdened and constrained by the expectations of those closest to them.
-- Rahul Roy, Chicago
Carefully structured, beautifully paced, with vivid characters and thought-provoking juxtapositions between the two stories.
-- Isabella Furth, San Diego
I have just emerged from the last part of your enchanting first novel. I fell completely under a spell as the characters evolved and demanded my full attention. You have created a world for the reader. Thank you, dear friend!
-- Nancy Cannon-O’Connell, San Diego
For me, this book is about a woman and her art. Art consumes. As a male artist, you’re allowed to take leave from life. Your art is considered big enough to take leave from life. As a female artist, your art is never seen to be absorbing enough. I am intrigued by the conversation that Mrinalini constantly has with herself about the legitimacy of leaving life for her art. She leaves yet doesn’t leave.
-- Lopa Banerjee, New York
Your novel conveys the struggles and dilemmas of women artists.
-- Anchita Ghatak, Kolkata
The novel is thoroughly entertaining due to its vivid storytelling, while stretching the reader's comfort zone through the stories it tells.
-- Frank Wuerthwein, San Diego
It is splendid.... The narrative of Variations is straightforward and realistic. It presents the interwoven stories of two Indian women in very different life circumstances, more than 130 years apart. The two stories have many parallel elements: each woman pushes against social constraints; each deals with the difficulties of marriage; each has creative, artistic urges that need space to develop and be expressed…. The language throughout is clean and beautiful, and the dialogue crisp and authentic. Formally, the novel’s structure is complicated, offering connections and opportunities for insight that can reward rereading. The convergences and divergences create a cool dramatic "space" in which the two stories interlace. For me as a reader, the dual stories flow seamlessly. And there are so many wonderful moments!
-- Walter Wright, Worcester
Variations was the first public working title of my first novel. This title came from the structure of the novel. The current title is Night Heron. It could just as easily be Vagabond, No.
When I started this novel, I wanted to write about a woman’s development into an artist. My first protagonist was someone like me, but not me. As I wrote the first chapter, over many months, I realized that my first protagonist, like me, had genealogies that could not simply be spoken as memories and stories. This led to my second protagonist, whose story forms a lower layer of what I saw as a necessary palimpsest. So I wrote my novel alternating one story and the other.
I gave my “beta-readers,” from the United States, Germany, and India, the full manuscript in the alternating-chapter form. Their feedback led me to think more deeply about how to convey variation in a sequenced expression. I talked to a Western classical pianist friend, Erica Poole, who told me about a recital in which the pianist played a Rachmaninov Etude after Julia Wolfe’s “Earring.” These specific pieces, with this specific sequencing, were key to helping me sense, and think about, the non-linear coherence of sequential variation in my novel.
So, if you have my manuscript (or book!) I encourage you to listen to the two pieces below as a prelude to the novel.
Prelude
1. Earring, by Julia Wolfe, played by Thalia Myers
2. Etude Tableau in A Minor, Opus 39, No. 2, by Sergei Rachmaninov, played by Vladimir Ashkenazy
Erica Poole introduced Meenakshi Chakraverti to these pieces and this sequencing. Ms. Poole heard Conrad Tao play these pieces in this astoundingly brilliant order at the Aspen Music Festival in 2014.
SYNOPSIS
Variations/Night Heron is about two women, both mothers, an artist in the early 21st century and a writer in the late 19th century, who flinch from the jubilation of full engagement with artistic effort and yet are driven to risk deeper engagement. Each ends up touching the joy of artistic creation and bearing its costs. Their interleaved stories explore independence, loneliness, death, and art, amidst larger narratives of political conflict and social change across four continents.
Pakhi, a Bengali-American artist and international consultant with a busy internal life of images, words, and memories, breaks her routine of parenting, art, and internet-mediated work to embark on a journey that takes her through New York, Berlin, and Bujumbura. Her story is interleaved with the story of a nineteenth-century Bengali woman, Mrinalini.
Mrinalini lives a mostly sequestered life in a Bengali joint family that has settled in the declining courtly city of Lucknow, far away from Bengal. Educated and literate in three languages, she is frustrated by the limitations of her thinking and words. She travels to her village of origin in Bengal for a major festival, suffers a great loss, and returns a changed woman.
As each woman grapples with choices involving obligation, love, and art, the palimpsests and genealogies that surface in their stories reveal, as in any human life, a connected and expansive narrative.
My blog posts about Night Heron
Mrinalini Through A Hegelian Veil
Mother Agonistes
WHAT READERS SAY ABOUT NIGHT HERON/VARIATIONS
Your novel captures the essence of LONGING - on one hand, the need to feel and be part of the security of “home”; on the other hand, the longing to develop oneself into a fuller person, even if that means breaking with everything that people around you expect of you. That second part is the true driver of the novel for me - I love the ways your two central characters in the parallel stories are searching, longing, exploring, reaching … trying to find themselves while being burdened and constrained by the expectations of those closest to them.
-- Rahul Roy, Chicago
Carefully structured, beautifully paced, with vivid characters and thought-provoking juxtapositions between the two stories.
-- Isabella Furth, San Diego
I have just emerged from the last part of your enchanting first novel. I fell completely under a spell as the characters evolved and demanded my full attention. You have created a world for the reader. Thank you, dear friend!
-- Nancy Cannon-O’Connell, San Diego
For me, this book is about a woman and her art. Art consumes. As a male artist, you’re allowed to take leave from life. Your art is considered big enough to take leave from life. As a female artist, your art is never seen to be absorbing enough. I am intrigued by the conversation that Mrinalini constantly has with herself about the legitimacy of leaving life for her art. She leaves yet doesn’t leave.
-- Lopa Banerjee, New York
Your novel conveys the struggles and dilemmas of women artists.
-- Anchita Ghatak, Kolkata
The novel is thoroughly entertaining due to its vivid storytelling, while stretching the reader's comfort zone through the stories it tells.
-- Frank Wuerthwein, San Diego
It is splendid.... The narrative of Variations is straightforward and realistic. It presents the interwoven stories of two Indian women in very different life circumstances, more than 130 years apart. The two stories have many parallel elements: each woman pushes against social constraints; each deals with the difficulties of marriage; each has creative, artistic urges that need space to develop and be expressed…. The language throughout is clean and beautiful, and the dialogue crisp and authentic. Formally, the novel’s structure is complicated, offering connections and opportunities for insight that can reward rereading. The convergences and divergences create a cool dramatic "space" in which the two stories interlace. For me as a reader, the dual stories flow seamlessly. And there are so many wonderful moments!
-- Walter Wright, Worcester