A review by chrysemys
The Crow Eaters by Bapsi Sidhwa

5.0

The Crow Eaters is something of an idyll, the story of a Parsi family in pre-Partition Lahore. I think the book was written largely to give the outside world a picture of Parsi culture. The characters are more caricatures than anything else--characters from a melodrama--and the story feels a lot like a folktale in spite of the more modern phenomena that appear, e.g. railroads and insurance fraud. Except... Sidhwa specifies a time when her novel occurs: it begins in 1901 and ends around 1940. On occasion, the author refers to things she and the reader know from our own time (e.g. WWII and discotheques) that the characters do not yet know about. Since it is otherwise a book set very much in its own time (without, say, overt nostalgia or attempts to take a lesson from our benighted ancestors) the anachronistic references are a bit jarring.
Quite good!