Happily the novel’s infectious exuberance compensates for the overwrought prose.
A rambunctious second novel from the award-winning Shanghvi (The Last Song of Dusk, 2004), in which the spectacle of Bombay serves as backdrop for a dizzying plot involving murder, adultery, AIDS, police corruption, bribery, celebrity and the lonely pursuit of high art.
The story takes place in 1990s Bombay, where flamingoes occupy a city wasteland. Karan Seth is new to the city, a newspaper photographer with a promising future. His life is forever altered when he is asked to photograph the reclusive pianist Samar Arora; during the shoot, Samar’s best friend Zaira, a Bollywood superstar, shows up. Karan is brought into their rarefied world of cocktails and art-chat, becomes a confidant of Zaira (though there is no attraction as she is in love with Samar, who is gay, and lives with American writer Leo) and is encouraged to pursue his grand project, a photographic portrait of Bombay. While at a bazaar, Karan meets Rhea Dalal, an enigmatic ceramicist who first leads him to the photo-worthy sights of Bombay, and then to her penthouse bedroom. Karan and Rhea’s relationship is complicated by the fact that she is passionately in love with her husband. In the midst of the melodrama, tragedy strikes—Zaira is killed by a man who has been stalking her for years. What follows is a portrait of corruption as it becomes likely that the murderer, the son of a high-ranking politician, will be set free. Meanwhile, Leo contracts AIDS and returns to San Francisco with Samar; Rhea becomes pregnant and breaks off the affair; and Karan gives up photography and moves to London. But the story’s not done until the living principals return to Bombay, ravaged by tragedy and prepared to accept their fate. All this would be quite a ride if it were not so often weighted with verbosity: “The timeless splendor surrounding them resounded with wisdom and betrayal, and they were compelled to speak in whispers, for the landscape discouraged sound, supplying a stillness that held them both like a flag in a fist.”
Happily the novel’s infectious exuberance compensates for the overwrought prose.Pub Date: Oct. 12, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-312-59349-0
Page Count: 368
Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
Review Posted Online: Aug. 5, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet...
Four Chicago sisters anchor a sharp, sly family story of feminine guile and guilt.
Newcomer Lombardo brews all seven deadly sins into a fun and brimming tale of an unapologetically bougie couple and their unruly daughters. In the opening scene, Liza Sorenson, daughter No. 3, flirts with a groomsman at her sister’s wedding. “There’s four of you?” he asked. “What’s that like?” Her retort: “It’s a vast hormonal hellscape. A marathon of instability and hair products.” Thus begins a story bristling with a particular kind of female intel. When Wendy, the oldest, sets her sights on a mate, she “made sure she left her mark throughout his house—soy milk in the fridge, box of tampons under the sink, surreptitious spritzes of her Bulgari musk on the sheets.” Turbulent Wendy is the novel’s best character, exuding a delectable bratty-ness. The parents—Marilyn, all pluck and busy optimism, and David, a genial family doctor—strike their offspring as impossibly happy. Lombardo levels this vision by interspersing chapters of the Sorenson parents’ early lean times with chapters about their daughters’ wobbly forays into adulthood. The central story unfurls over a single event-choked year, begun by Wendy, who unlatches a closed adoption and springs on her family the boy her stuffy married sister, Violet, gave away 15 years earlier. (The sisters improbably kept David and Marilyn clueless with a phony study-abroad scheme.) Into this churn, Lombardo adds cancer, infidelity, a heart attack, another unplanned pregnancy, a stillbirth, and an office crush for David. Meanwhile, youngest daughter Grace perpetrates a whopper, and “every day the lie was growing like mold, furring her judgment.” The writing here is silky, if occasionally overwrought. Still, the deft touches—a neighborhood fundraiser for a Little Free Library, a Twilight character as erotic touchstone—delight. The class calibrations are divine even as the utter apolitical whiteness of the Sorenson world becomes hard to fathom.
Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet another pleasurable tendril of sisterly malice uncurls.Pub Date: June 25, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54425-2
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: March 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...
An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.
Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad. The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized). As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses). Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture. Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year.Pub Date: March 6, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-70376-4
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000
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