Book Review: Problems by Jade Sharma

 

Maya, of Indian-American descent, has a dope habit - in the US dope refers to heroine, while in its UK acception it has to do with marijuana - and lives in NYC with her husband Peter which has a big alcohol problem. This is at the beginning of the one-chapter long book of Problems by the late Jade Sharma. 

We know she is called Maya a couple of pages into the book. She often feels empty and therefore is pushing hard experiencing extreme feelings, particularly through various sexual encounters. ´I like it hard´ is the motto of her playing down her sexuality. The act in itself - no matter how hard - ceased to matter as it operate at a certain extent as the dope. The more, the better, but only because the intensity got lost into the moment and although it gives a certain feeling of excitement and general comfortable wellbeing it is evanescent. It goes away so fast. Sadly fast. 

´I didn´t know. I was a marriage. Marriage is boring, and sometimes you want to kill the person, and sometimes you feel the truth of a million clichés about having one real partner to grow old with when the world is cold and full of strangers. But most of the time, I didn´t feel anything´. Sex and any kind of physical contact in general should be brutal and dramatic because only such experience may make her alive sometimes. 

The whole book of Problems is a long monologue of Maya´s interogations into her own lack of complete feelings, and this includes also the fragments when she is objectivising herself, with the detachment of talking about oneself at the third person. It is a recurrent reflection, an interesting switch of the narrative that otherwise would have been, maybe, a bit too bland (at least for my taste).

Maya is just one of the many literary characters of the last couple of years, launched on a search for nothing. Although I either don´t like them or not want to deal with them at all, I may recognize in them sometimes fragments of me, sometimes shadows of friends or generational encounters. I feel irritated about sharing the world with some of them, but they are real and it´s not my business to evaluate their existence. They already have their own Problems. 

It seems the more I read such books populated with such characters the more tolerant towards those characters and stories I am. Not sure how all this will end up, but I have some introspective reasons to consider when I am analyzing those books.

The writing is raw and rough and there are small stories that do not match the big story or are not intended to anyway. But it is a short read which concentrates enough tension and confusion to make you survive until the end of it. 

It´s just bad that Sharma died in 2019, at the age of 39 and therefore unable to go further this debut novel.

Rating: 3 stars