But Viveka is too conflicted and confused for any real clarity. Valmiki recognizes the ambivalence in his daughter's approach to the world and, late in the novel, tries to encourage her to leave Trinidad, to allow her to escape the double standards and hypocrisies that have ruled his own life. Viveka's sexual awakening is the main subject of this novel, and Mootoo writes about sexual desire well, in passages that are precise and explicit. In a self-defeating and heavily authorial aside, Viveka notes that Naipaul 'hadn't ever really paid attention in his work to the presence of blacks in the country' Mootoo doesn't pay much heed to this either, though her upper-class characters are obsessed with class and race while unable to move beyond either in any meaningful way. Naipaul haunts Viveka through her study of the literatures of the West Indies, as it haunts this novel. As well as the spirit of Anand, the ghost of V. On the page, she is pale in comparison with her rowdy papa, uncertain about her own sexuality, unhappy in her own skin, channelling her dead brother, the family's only son. When the wife of Valmiki's lover rushes up to her in the market and claims they are alike - 'You and me, we in this thing together' - Devika recoils.ĭespite all the material advantages her family's position grants her, with parents like these, Valmiki's daughter, Viveka, doesn't really stand a chance in life, or in fiction. Valmiki's wife, Devika, is as conflicted as her husband she knows what he does and the lies he tells, but she has decided to live with it, her only response to throw the occasional elaborate and expensive party.

Valmiki's Daughter by Shani Mootoo