Tivolem - Victor Rangel-Ribeiro

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Title: Tivolem
Author: Victor Rangel-Ribeiro
Milkweed Editions. 1998. 344 pages.

Review by Anderson Tepper


.......Victor Rangel-Ribeiro has waited until his early 70s to offer his own slice of the fertile literary landscape of the subcontinent. His first novel, Tivolem, is set in 1933 in the Portuguese colony of Goa on the west coast of India. Here, in the tiny village that gives the book its title, his characters gather around the lone shortwave radio for news from Europe and even India, reminded by the sirens of distant ships “of oceans ever to be crossed, of events beyond our control.” While the outside world is full of drama, little seems to happen in Tivolem. So it’s all the more exciting when a woman named Marie-Santana returns to the village after the death of her parents in Mozambique (and 23 years after she left as a young girl), trailed by a whiff of scandal and the “very long shadow” of a former fiancé.

.......Now the town gossips have something to occupy them---and they have even more to talk about when Simon Fernandes, Marie-Santana’s violin-playing neighbor (who has also recently returned from abroad), begins serenading her each night. Ultimately, Simon’s link to the secrets of Marie-Santana’s past helps teach her, as one of the characters puts it, that “our lives themselves are like the crossings and recrossings of a river.” Reflecting this wisdom, the novel ambles along at an unhurried pace, reveling in the small but resonant happenings of a faraway time and place.

―Anderson Tepper - The New York Times Sunday Book Review, June 5, 1998.

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Excerpt from an assessment of Victor Rangel-Ribeiro’s work in 'South Asian Novelists in English--An A to Z Guide', edited by Jaina C. Sanga. Greenwood Press, 2003.

.......Tivolem describes the unfolding lives of the people in an imaginary village in Goa, and is perhaps the only major novel in English to be set in the heart of the “other” raj in India: the centuries-old Portuguese colony of Goa. Readers are by now quite familiar with novels in/about India that trace British oppression and brutality; thus, it is very refreshing to read about this other India that seems at once removed and enmeshed in the affairs of the world. This slender connectivity is gently underscored because the novel, set between the two world wars, recounts the first rumblings of anticolonialist revolutions in pre-Independence India vis-à-vis the major political tensions erupting in Europe. The primary thrust of the novel is to create a mood around a sense of place and reveal another facet of India that is part, yet apart, from the world… Tivolem, I would argue, is subtly crafted and rehearses more than multicultural diversity.

.......The paradoxical pull of distance and engagement that mediates events between Tivolem and the rest of the world becomes visible through the novel’s neorealist style and its author’s astutely ironic humor. This neorealism gently splashes against the readers’ sensibilities and drives the novel’s actions in almost the same manner that the Mandovi River’s tides move boats and small ships as they ferry the various characters about. Some reviewers have likened Rangel-Ribeiro’s style to R. K. Narayan’s realist mode, but Tivolem is closer to Mulk Raj Anand’s or Anita Desai’s style, both of whom, the author admits, have had an impact on him. Even as it presents a romance between Marie-Santana and Simon Fernandes, Tivolem describes the complex cultural, religious, and political lives of Indian families in a Portuguese colonial setting, situated as they are on the cusp of tradition and modernity. From a canonical perspective, the novel reminds one of George Eliot’s Middlemarch, which too is structured on the cusp of Victorian and Edwardian culture, reveals labor upheavals, and raises political, gender, and class questions under the guise of a love story between Dorothea Brooke and Will Ladislaw.

.......Rangel-Ribeiro tackles various, complex themes in the novel. Some of these are the meaning of diaspora, as articulated through the language of rootedness and rootlessness; strategies of colonial insurgence, elaborated through satirical exchanges between characters; feminine subjectivity, illustrated through strong matriarchal figures such as Dona Elena and Dona Esmeralda and through the courageous heroine, Marie-Santana; and the role and status of Christianity as a disciplinary mechanism in the colony, symbolized through the figure of Father Mascarenhas, who has a Latin phrase or quotation for every occasion. The novel’s plot, which unfolds both according to calendar months and to seasons like “Monsoons, 1933,” can also be compared to the paintings of European masters such as Antoine Watteau. Watteau’s Seasons, for example, inaugurated the technique of portraying human passions and desires through a tableau of actors painted inside oval frames. Such experimentation, critics agree, allowed Watteau to move beyond linking earthly nature to human nature (which was the standard practice) to painting provocatively nuanced passionate moments. Finally, the novel’s use of music as a metaphor of hope and despair, in the hands of the hero Simon Fernandes, is also worthy of critical attention.

.......One theme―of human connectivity―is dramatized through a bridge on the edge of town as a crucial trope―both literally and figuratively―for informing the reader of some of the major debates and controversies of the day. Here, some of the primary characters discuss local and global news gathered by Senhor Eusebio, the owner of the only shortwave radio in the village. The bridge signals the tenuous connections between Portuguese and British India and between the trivial affairs of the here and now of Tivolem and the turbulent events occurring in Europe and America around this momentous time in world history. Such a narrative strategy allows readers to glimpse another side of the nation, wherein the stresses and strains of Portuguese rule, a lesser-known colonial force, impacts the lives of its subjects. The bridge also serves as the platform ground for the author to engage the reader in conversations about postcolonial issues pertaining to the hierarchy of colonized nations in the race for modernity, without belaboring the point. This light touch allows the author to use and critically deploy older vocabularies of postcolonial discourse in a contemporary, cosmopolitan, context….

.......Tivolem is a layered narrative, rich in texture and full of sharp humor, which merits greater attention.

.......―Gita Rajan

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About the author:

Victor Rangel-Ribeiro began his professional writing career in Bombay in 1945, and has been writing ever since. His short stories and features have appeared in the United States and in the Indian press, in Goan publications such as The Navhind Times, Govapuri, and the Goan Observer, and in the Penguin anthology Ferry Crossing. In the US his work has appeared in three top literary journals: the Iowa, North American, and Literary Reviews. He was awarded the New York Foundation for the Arts Fiction Fellowship in 1990, and the Milkweed National Fiction Prize for his novel, Tivolem, in 1998.This novel has been acclaimed by Booklist as one of the twenty notable first novels published in the US that year. A short story collection, Loving Ayesha, was published in India in 2003.

Rangel-Ribeiro has taught writing in New York and conducted workshops there and in Mumbai and Goa. He serves on the editorial board of the South Asian Review and has for several years been on the online international creative writing faculty of Fairleigh Dickinson University, New Jersey.

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