The talking cure has come almost too late for the oddly prim ex-sailor and his family. There is nothing to involve the...
An immigrant father’s silence about his background roils the life of his family in England; in this awkward eighth novel, Gurnah (Desertion, 2005, etc.), a Briton of Zanzibari descent, revisits the theme of alienation.
It was almost love at first sight. In 1974, they were working in the same factory in the English town of Exeter. Maryam was 17; Abbas was 34. Maryam was a dark-complected foundling, abandoned outside a hospital. Her foster parents, Indian immigrants, after some initial kindness, began treating her like a slave, so it was an easy decision to elope with Abbas, though she knew virtually nothing about him. He proves a good husband, and they have two children, Hanna and Jamal. Though he is loving with them too, Abbas never opens up about his background, and this becomes a source of frustration for Maryam and the kids. Who is this gentle, withdrawn man? He was born in Zanzibar. His family were Indian Muslims, dirt poor. His father, a subsistence farmer, was a tyrant, but Abbas escaped to a teacher training college. A bright future was doomed when he was tricked into an arranged marriage; his bride was already pregnant. At 19, Abbas fled Zanzibar and became a sailor for 15 years before settling in England. It is his irrational shame at abandoning his deceitful wife that has kept his lips sealed. The novel begins with the 62-year-old Abbas collapsing at home: It’s the first of three strokes. Maryam pressures him to tape-record his memories. Gurnah moves jarringly between past and present, in which the grown children, better at life than their parents, are discovering sex and confronting racism. More damagingly, the author disregards fiction’s first commandment: Show, don’t tell. So the family stays out of focus, less a unit than four individuals struggling with their own destinies.
The talking cure has come almost too late for the oddly prim ex-sailor and his family. There is nothing to involve the reader in this protagonist’s dilemma.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-62040-328-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2013
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
Sisters in and out of love.
Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45073-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
A presold prefab blockbuster, what with King's Carrie hitting the moviehouses, Salem's Lot being lensed, The Shining itself sold to Warner Bros. and tapped as a Literary Guild full selection, NAL paperback, etc. (enough activity to demand an afterlife to consummate it all).
The setting is The Overlook, a palatial resort on a Colorado mountain top, snowbound and closed down for the long, long winter. Jack Torrance, a booze-fighting English teacher with a history of violence, is hired as caretaker and, hoping to finish a five-act tragedy he's writing, brings his wife Wendy and small son Danny to the howling loneliness of the half-alive and mad palazzo. The Overlook has a gruesome past, scenes from which start popping into the present in various suites and the ballroom. At first only Danny, gifted with second sight (he's a "shiner"), can see them; then the whole family is being zapped by satanic forces. The reader needs no supersight to glimpse where the story's going as King's formula builds to a hotel reeling with horrors during Poesque New Year's Eve revelry and confetti outta nowhere....
Back-prickling indeed despite the reader's unwillingness at being mercilessly manipulated.
Pub Date: Jan. 28, 1976
ISBN: 0385121679
Page Count: 453
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1976
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