The Gravity of Sunlight

Rating:
Summary: A story of many layers
Review: Rosa Shand's first book is filled with simple but beautiful language, description of the physical and the emotional experience of living in Uganda during the time right before and during Idi Amin's political coup. As the story unfolds, Shand manages to very gently capture the very complicated relationships between husband and wife, wife and lover, amidst the rhythms of life in a foreign land, all which help make this a very successful debut novel.

Agnes is our narrator, and she, her husband John and their young children have moved to Uganda. John is a professor teaching at the college; Agnes teaches part-time at the lower school. Each of them is lost in their respective idealisms, and their relationship is suffering for it, as they don't seem to have an intimate connection on any real level. Agnes, who is always searching to fulfill what she feels is a lack of meaningful attachment to her husband, meets Wulf, who is also teaching at the university, and is a friend of her husband's, they embark on a tentative relationship.

What works about this novel, is that this affair, in all its various stages and with all its various consequences, is written in a way that echoes the lifestyle and the political uncertainties of the country. Shand weaves Agnes' story with an intimate look at a society very different from Agnes'and our own, and these dual storylines are revealed piece by piece to the reader as the circumstances of Agnes' daily life allows. She uses deceptively simple language to tell a story of many layers, each one as lush and as precarious as the next. A fine book to curl up with on a wintry weekend, which is about how long it will take to read.

Rating:
Summary: Reflections on The Gravity of Sunlight
Review: The Gravity of Sunlight by Rosa Shand is an extraordinary and sensuous novel equally brilliant in its creation of place (Uganda in the 1970's during Amin's rise to power) and its exploration of human desire. Shand's depth of image in the externals of Africa -- the smells of wood smoke and gardenias; the musical sounds in the "buzz and whir" of insects or antiphonal native song floating through the "rustling of mango leaves;" and the sights of "thick green," "dusty glitter," and flopping banana leaves -- become inseparable from the internal soul. Equally, Shand's portrayal of characters through Agnes's sensitive and urgent consciousness, as when she sees Wulf during the early stages of her attraction to him,"a figure in a gleaming pure-white jacket, a man in the dark at the bottom of her drive" deeply penetrate not only Agnes's soul but our own interior selves.

Agnes is a woman who craves love and attachment to all living things. Uganda, teeming with aliveness, paradoxically both nourishes her and fosters her restlessness and need for fulfillment. So real is the experience of this book that I felt a tightening in my own chest, becoming connected to Agnes's joy, pain, and ultimately her confusion and disorder over the mystery of love and how it perches in one's own heart.

Rating:
Summary: Weak, uninspired. Don't buy.
Review: This book was bursting with amateurish problems/mistakes that should have been removed by any good editor. The story was tasteless and banal, like eating cream of wheat every day of your life. The praises about the love story are in total disregard of the stylistic errors and cheesy genre orientation of this fiction. This is Danielle Steel in a cheap disguise. It has no litereary value whatsoever. Rosa Shand is a hack. After a while, I threw the book across the room and refused to read past the half way mark of the book.

Buy this only if you have absolutely no respect for yourself.