Burnt Sugar

“To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge—and therefore like power.”

— Susan Sontag, ‘On Photography’

Burnt Sugar Summary

In Burnt Sugar, by Avni Doshi, Antara, the book’s protagonist, appropriates a photograph, by drawing her own rendition of it day in and day out in what appears to be an attempt to put herself in a position, into a certain relation to the world that feels like power. Antara is an artist, an artist who had a hellish childhood. As an infant, her mother, Tara, “would disappear every day, dripping with milk,” leaving Antara hungry. When Burnt Sugar takes place, Tara suffers from cognitive decline leaving Antara to wrestle with both Tara’s  disease and her past abuse. The book oscillates between Antara’s present day and her childhood. Her narration is eerily dispassionate, making abuse, cults, homelessness, and coke seem ordinary, boring even. 

Burnt Sugar Book Review

What strikes me most about Burnt Sugar is the notion of rendition represented in Antara’s mysterious photograph. I first read the Sontag quote above in Shoshanna Zuboff’s book, Surveillance Capitalism. In it, Zuboff writes, “The noun rendition derives from the verb render…” Zuboff explains that the verb has two meanings.  “On one side of the equation,” Zuboff writes, “the verb describes a process in which something is formed out of something else that is originally given. It designates the causal action of turning one thing into another, such as rendering oil from fat (extraction) or rendering an English text from the original Latin (translation)…On the other side of the equation, render also describes the way in which the thing that is changed gives itself over to this process: it sur-renders.” 

Both definitions of render playout on all levels of Burnt Sugar. Like Antara, we are all rendered by childhood, shaped and changed by the experience of growing up. Like Antara, many of us also, for reasons as extreme as abuse or as banal as apathy, sur-render to our childhoods or other circumstances. In either case, our view of the world is thus rendered. Antara’s rendering of the world leads her to see it as a hopeless, dark, and inevitably grotesque place. She describes sushi as a “submissive tongue,” and in recollecting her childhood, Antara explains, “Sometimes I can feel that girl crowning at the back of my throat trying to come out through any orifice she can. But I swallow her until the next time she wants to be born again.” Graphic, right?

It’s through this rendition, this lens, that Antara struggles to come to terms with her mother’s condition as Tara’s mind renders itself useless: it sur-renders to disease. But how does Antara care for someone who never cared for her? “I would be lying if I said my mother’s misery has never given me pleasure,” Burnt Sugar begins. (What a first sentence!) And who could blame Antara for feeling schadenfreude?

To any of us, the world can seem like disgusting place deeply lacking in humanity, and Burnt Sugar shows that what we make of the world is a rendering of our experience. But Doshi also reminds us that hurt people hurt people. And though I hold this idea in high esteem, I couldn’t muster much compassion for Antara, though I couldn’t condemn her for her thoughts or actions either. None of the characters in Burnt Sugar are likable, and none of them value relationships, say nothing of marriage. Burnt Sugar a depressing book, sickening almost but intriguing, nonetheless. It’s a fly-on-the-wall look at a truly dysfunctional family. 

Burnt Sugar

by Avni Doshi