An Indian-American variation on a stock tearjerker plot, saved by the author's eye for detail.
A preteen girl stumbles across a host of dark family secrets on a visit to her parents’ native India.
Nair’s debut novel opens with its 20-something narrator, Rakhee, leaving her fiancé a note saying she must hustle back to India to resolve a family issue. The story that follows explains her rush, flashing back to when she was 10 and describing the emotionally charged summer she spent at her mother’s bustling family homestead. When she first arrived with her mother, the scorching heat was a striking contrast to the chilly winters back home in Minnesota. But while she initially misses her father and the conveniences of American life, she’s soon comforted by the extended family, especially her three female cousins. From there, things quickly grow complicated: Aunts and uncles are squabbling over the rights to manage the homestead and the family-run hospital, while her mother appears to have rekindled her romance with a childhood crush. The starkest evidence that the family is fraying is a discovery Rakhee makes when she ventures past the property: a cottage occupied by Tulasi, a young girl whose facial deformation prompted her parents to care for her but hide her away. Nair gently packs the story with plenty of commentary about Indian domestic life, mythology and, most of all, its sexist culture—throughout the summer, Rakhee learns how restricted women are in marriage, property ownership and, as Tulasi proves, the right to a public existence. Ultimately, that gives the book the shape of a melodrama, which grows overheated in its climactic scenes. But if the final chapters are driven by familiar conflicts, charming individual moments are sprinkled throughout. Scenes in which Rakhee observes her mother’s guilt over betraying her husband reveal the girl’s growing emotional acuity, and Rakhee’s relationship with Tulasi is elegantly turned, conveying a sense of magic that comes with children having a space to share secrets without neglecting the sinister circumstances that locked Tulasi away.
An Indian-American variation on a stock tearjerker plot, saved by the author's eye for detail.Pub Date: June 15, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-446-57268-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: April 6, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2011
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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