Amanda Grutzius
On
Kirin Narayan's Love, Stars and All That

The story of Love, Stars, and All That is magnificent. Kirin Narayan is able to portray an incredible story of a young graduate student in search of the love of her life, while trying to accomplish school. Gita attends Berkeley for graduate school, and she spends the majority of her nights focused on school and not her love life. She maintained order in her life by working on school and school only. She never really considered dating anyone, until she was told about her horoscope.

Horoscopes were given at birth. The stars form a certain pattern at a child’s birth. The planets form an outline of what the stars will predict for the child. Gita’s Kaka, or uncle, predicted her horoscope when she was born, but he mixes the astrology with German numerology. When Gita asked to know about her horoscope, her uncle found the notebook in which the horoscope had been drawn up in and figured the calculations. He wrote out her name and added up each letter, followed by drawing a five-pointed star in which a mass amount of numbers was arranged around. His answer for Gita was that by the time she was twenty-three years, seven months, and five days, she would find a boy. This is just the beginning of an incredible journey for Gita.

Gita was attending Berkeley on a scholarship. Her studies were extremely important to her. As the story proceeds though, Gita pays more attention to the males that come and go in her life. With each person, she tries to figure out if they will be the one for her, even though she may just have a class with them. She first becomes interested in a poet named Timothy Stilling. This interest only comes about thanks to her Saroj Aunty. She has Timothy deliver a gift for Gita when he comes into town for a poetry visit. Timothy comes and goes a few times, but when she met him, she also met one of the professors from Berkeley, Norvin Weinstein.

Gita begins to see Norvin more and more on campus, and he enjoys working with her. Whenever Timothy would drop in for a visit, the three would go out and have a good time together. Little did Gita know, that what she hoped would become a love interest with Timothy, ended up becoming a marriage with Norvin. In the chapter, The Eiffel Tower Does Not Meet the Grand Canyon, she learns that she is mistaken by love. She misunderstood a kiss from Timothy to be a hopeful future, but Timothy made her realize otherwise. Once she knew that Timothy was not the one for her, she went back to focusing on her schoolwork. She spent her time once again, in her apartment, forming her graduate work.

The more she focused on school, the more Norvin came into the picture. He confided in Gita as he went through a divorce. He looks to her for compassion and support. As I read the story about his situation, it never seemed to have been a good marriage from the beginning. He and his wife, Rachel, were never together. Her moving to another state must have been her out for the marriage. Gita allows herself to get wrapped up in his pain. She tries to get his mind off of his failed marriage by talking more and more about India and her home and what life was like at home. It seems that since Norvin’s marriage is over, he has decided not to believe in love. Gita, on the other hand, strongly believes in love, but seems to become blinded by being needed by Norvin. Of all the people in the story, I found Gita’s roommate Bet the most humorous simply because she decides she does not trust Norvin and that since there is no one else there to look after Gita, it is her job to do so. She does not want to see anything terrible happen to Gita.

Gita’s mother seems to be displeased that Gita does not follow everything she was raised upon once her social life becomes busier. Her letters to her family become more irregular. Her mother claims she was raised better than that at home. This portion of the story seems to show how much family life and how one is raised is followed in her homeland. Within this displeasure though, Gita learns of her uncle’s death. This saddens her deeply and I think she begins to pay more attention to her family once again.

Suddenly, out of nowhere in the story, Norvin asks Gita to marry him. I found this quite out of the blue and it threw me off the story somewhat. What I did like though, was that Gita was not sure if she loved Norvin or not. She questioned herself, but of course Norvin told her that love was just a "bourgeois invention." This disturbed me because she went ahead and married him after that. It seemed like she gave up on what the stars had told her to do. I did not like that she just jumped into something that was not real. If love and marriage are supposed to be something safe and sacred, why did she allow herself to get involved with Norvin?

I was happy when their marriage failed and Saroj Aunty tried to fix her up with a new man. It brought new life to the story once again. The doom of the previous marriage brought out a new hope and a new life for Gita. That just brought the plot of the book to a new height. Gita found herself a new life to follow. She paid more attention to her family life and followed her heart.

I did not find much humor within the story, but there was a story that the group was telling that seemed hilarious. The group was talking about using erasers while doing homework, but apparently had been unable to say the word "eraser" when they first began their studies, so they called it a "rubber." When they asked a person to borrow a rubber, they received odd looks, not knowing what a rubber truly was. This just seems to be one of the most light-hearted parts to the story. It brings out some humor within the seriousness of the story.

I felt one of the most powerful lines of the story was when Saroj Aunty was giving Gita advice about having power in life. "Brains are power, charm is power, beauty too is power, and I don’t just mean the looks you are born with but all the aesthetic fit of everything you do." This line just really inspired me as I was reading. It truly is about real life and there is nothing false about it. It makes you take a step back and think about all of the people you know that have some sort of power in life. The best part was that Saroj Aunty had not mentioned that money is power within all the rest. Money is something that people feel the need to have and that is can be taken for granted very much. It seemed that Gita took this into high consideration.

Serendipity…one of my favorite words! It is just such an interesting word. I was extremely surprised that it was in this book. It brought a great sense of closure to the book. It brought about Gita seeing Timothy again and showed what her new life was turning into. It brought back all of the memories from the beginning of the story and made the reader realize just how much Gita had changed since the first few pages.

Overall, I thought the story was just incredible. I was not sure that I would enjoy the book when I bought it, but when I finally got into it, I could not put it down. The one thing that I really did not enjoy about the story was how there seemed to be journal entries within the plot. It kept throwing me off with the story. It might have been easier to have them at the end of the story, no matter how much they pertained to the next chapter. I highly recommend this book to anyone. I felt I got a good sense of what life was like in Gita’s homeland. It also gave the reader a good sense of how life is so completely different here in the United States. It was just a magnificent book and I am glad that I chose to read it. The characters and the entire plot were so interesting. The title gave it away the most. I loved it. Love, Stars, and All That is just a fabulous title. I think that is what drew me in to choose this book. It made a great ending to a good class this semester.