My book group chose this book for January. The group tends to choose lighter reads for our first books of the year. Sleepwalker’s Guide fit the bill. Although it clocks in at almost 500 page it flowed quickly and was an easy read.
Amina is a photographer living in Seattle when her mother. Kamala, calls from Albuquerque to tell her that her father has been speaking with dead relatives. Her father, Thomas, is a brain surgeon. Amina thinks her mother might be exaggerating about her father in order to lure her home, but then decides to take a few days to visit.
Moving backward in time, Jacobs reveals a devastating “vacation” to visit family in India. Thomas’s mother, a successful physician, lives in the family house with her other son, Sunil, and his family. She is determined that Thomas should move back to India with the family and practice in a local clinic. Thomas wants none of it. Sunil resents Thomas for having left and his successful career in the US. Sunil often sleepwalks and doesn’t remember his actions during these periods. The trip ends badly.
Going back and forth in time, present day Amina is dealing with her own trauma from taking a photo of a man as he jumped from the Aurora bridge to his death. She had been on assignment on a cruise ship when this occurred. The photograph is both celebrated and reviled which leads her to give up photo journalism. At the time she is going home to tend to her father she is working as a wedding photographer.
In Albuquerque Amina finds her mother cooking and trying to set her up with a doctor, minimizing her father’s strange behavior. Everyone is emotionally screwed up, as the story again goes back in time and we learn of the death of Amina’s brother when she was a teenager. Amina and her parents have lived with his death, primarily by ignoring it. Now things have come to a head with her father’s illness. He speaks with the relatives who have died in India, and has an incident at the hospital that leads to him finally having to seek a diagnosis.
Their chosen family in Albuquerque, other Indian immigrants, try to help them. Thomas and Kamala rebuff their kindness, but the family is as stubborn as they are. Amina’s visit of a few days turns into weeks and she is faced with her own life decisions as well as those of her parents. With a camera in hand for over 20 years she’s been an observer or others’ pains and foibles and remarkably blind to her own.
Overall, this is a good story. It includes many of the themes of immigrant family stories: families left behind, the struggle for inclusion by the younger generation, the food. It is told in a light, humorous way, where it could have been quite maudlin if told poorly. Some of the funnier moments involve wedding photos, which I am still picturing in my head. A good book to start the year.
