Frustrating "Travelers"

Despite newspapers and all the other claims on my time, I was able to finish a book today. Unsure what to tackle next, I went bookshelf hunting and came up with Ruth Prawer Jhabvala's Travelers, which explores the lives of four wandering souls who converge in India.

I found the book unsatisfying, and I'm not entirely sure that that wasn't the author's intent. It ends without resolution - okay for a short story, but not after the investment of reading a novel. Moreover, the characters are opaque, and don't seem to know themselves very well. You learn more about them from the way they see one another than from the chapters "about" them. How do you sympathize with a character that remains profoundly unreal? And yet, their circumstances - for the most part self-inflicted - provoke sympathy. This complexity drives the book, as do an array of relationships that consist of dominant and submissive parties. [I paused in typing for an extended reverie on whether I was judging sadomasochism and claiming it was incompatible with healthy loving relationships.] The games that characters play to exert control over others are uncomfortable and do not - it hardly needs to be said - make for pleasant reading.

So in the time it's taken to write this, I've decided that the dissatisfaction and discomfort were intentional. Jhabvala could be commenting on the paradoxes of modern (Travelers was published in 1973) India, as well as the lengths people will go to in the attempt to find - or keep from finding - themselves. A dark and unsettling read.