Meera Krishnamurthy
Auteur de Balancing Act
A propos de l'auteur
Crédit image: Photo by author
Œuvres de Meera Krishnamurthy
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Partage des connaissances
- Autres noms
- Krishnamurthy, Meera
Krishnamurthy, Meera Godbole
Godbole-Krishnamurthy, Meera - Sexe
- female
- Lieux de résidence
- Mumbai, India
- Professions
- author, architect, artist
- Courte biographie
- Meera Godbole-Krishnamurthy was born in Mumbai in 1968 and has since 1980, lived in the Philippines, France, and many parts of the United States. She studied art and architecture at Oberlin College and Columbia University and received a Masters of Architecture from the University of Virginia in 1992. She has participated in writing workshops at Stanford University, the University of Iowa, UC San Diego and the La Jolla Writers Conference. She was an adjunct at the NewSchool of Architecture and Design in San Diego. An artist, she has sold and exhibited her work in California. She returned to India in 2006 and after a year in Bangalore, now lives in Mumbai with her husband, two children, and a well-travelled cat. She sometimes conducts writing workshops. Balancing Act is her first novel and explores themes of architecture, built space, the life and work of Louis Kahn, the Salk Institute, motherhood, feminism, and the implications of the creative life.
Membres
Critiques
Statistiques
- Œuvres
- 1
- Membres
- 10
- Popularité
- #908,816
- Évaluation
- 4.5
- Critiques
- 1
- ISBN
- 1
Tara has a handsome and successful husband, a beautiful home, devoted friends, and two adorable and adoring children. But she’s still haunted by the might-have-beens of her earlier life as a promising young architect. She’s occasionally visited by a yakshi, a Hindu fertility spirit with feminist sensibilities. With yakshi urging her to resume her career, and mounting resentment toward friends who seem to regard her as no more than a perfect housewife, Tara sends out her resumé and lands an interview with an architecture firm. But Tara learns that going back to work isn’t necessarily the answer to her dilemma, or the way to find balance and satisfaction in her life.
Architecture is central to the novel, both as Tara’s chosen field and as a metphor for creating balance and structure in one’s life. Tara is obsessed with the Salk Institute in nearby La Jolla, designed by the Estonian-born architect Louis Kahn. The Salk becomes Tara’s icon as she attempts to construct a coherent life for herself as a feminist, an artist, and a mother. It seems to represent both balance and contradiction, the inspiring and the pedestrian, the ordered and the chaotic—the material of both art and life. In the novel, the Salk is likened both to a monastic cloister and the sort of building that might contain dentists’ offices. It’s both transcendent and mundane, like life.
The book is teeming with ideas, and the author’s intellect is apparent on every page, but the novel not merely cerebral. Every detail of Tara’s life as mother is beautifully and authentically rendered. You can hear the laughter of the children on the playground, see the Cheerios and juice boxes, feel the urgency as Tara rushes to turn off the television before Barney comes on. Every detail of Tara’s world rings true.
After our paths diverged in the late 1980s, Meera went on to Columbia and the University of Virginia, to work as an architect and a new life as a stay-at-home mother and writer. I went to Brown University, was employed briefly as a professor of classics, and became a stay-at-home father and writer. I’m happy our lives finally converged again in this wonderful novel.… (plus d'informations)