Fresh, graceful stories create a palpable world.
A feminist Tamil writer explores the dreams and challenges of women’s lives.
Ambai (A Meeting on the Andheri Overbridge, 2016, etc.), the pseudonym used by researcher and educator Dr. C.S. Lakshmi for her fiction, evokes in sensuous, vibrant prose the colors, flavors, and sounds of Indian life in a collection of 21 stories translated by Holmström. The clash between tradition and modernity, the embrace of family and the desire for independence, the lure of transgression and of nostalgia, and the fraught meaning of freedom: These recur as themes in many stories that examine a woman’s struggle to define her identity in changing times. In “Wheelchair,” for example, Hitha is frustrated in her relationship with a self-proclaimed political revolutionary. “There is no difference whatsoever between a revolutionary and any other man when it comes to treading upon women,” Hitha asserts. She is looking for love; he tells her that love is a bourgeois disease. She listens to love songs; he criticizes them as “sentimental nonsense.” She wants to be cherished and, at the same time, is seduced by the idea of freedom. In the charming tale “Parasakti and Others in a Plastic Box,” a woman living in America, devastated by her recent divorce, is visited by her mother, who carries with her several miniature idols in a plastic box. Cooking traditional dishes, singing Tamil songs, and befriending neighbors, she exudes warmth and solace for the daughter who feels disconnected from her past. For some women, journeys—meaningful, necessary, planned, or spontaneous—end in epiphany; others find contentment at home. The title story, for example, takes place in a kitchen that, Ambai stresses, “was not a place; it was essentially a set of beliefs” propagated by women who sit in the shadows, their heads covered, kneading dough or stirring fragrant spices into dal. Yet Ambai upends the image of oppression: The women who make food appear “as from a magic carpet” reign in their kingdom of the kitchen, where they shape their families’ lives.
Fresh, graceful stories create a palpable world.Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-939810-44-1
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Archipelago
Review Posted Online: July 14, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2019
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.
Atwood goes back to Gilead.
The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), consistently regarded as a masterpiece of 20th-century literature, has gained new attention in recent years with the success of the Hulu series as well as fresh appreciation from readers who feel like this story has new relevance in America’s current political climate. Atwood herself has spoken about how news headlines have made her dystopian fiction seem eerily plausible, and it’s not difficult to imagine her wanting to revisit Gilead as the TV show has sped past where her narrative ended. Like the novel that preceded it, this sequel is presented as found documents—first-person accounts of life inside a misogynistic theocracy from three informants. There is Agnes Jemima, a girl who rejects the marriage her family arranges for her but still has faith in God and Gilead. There’s Daisy, who learns on her 16th birthday that her whole life has been a lie. And there's Aunt Lydia, the woman responsible for turning women into Handmaids. This approach gives readers insight into different aspects of life inside and outside Gilead, but it also leads to a book that sometimes feels overstuffed. The Handmaid’s Tale combined exquisite lyricism with a powerful sense of urgency, as if a thoughtful, perceptive woman was racing against time to give witness to her experience. That narrator hinted at more than she said; Atwood seemed to trust readers to fill in the gaps. This dynamic created an atmosphere of intimacy. However curious we might be about Gilead and the resistance operating outside that country, what we learn here is that what Atwood left unsaid in the first novel generated more horror and outrage than explicit detail can. And the more we get to know Agnes, Daisy, and Aunt Lydia, the less convincing they become. It’s hard, of course, to compete with a beloved classic, so maybe the best way to read this new book is to forget about The Handmaid’s Tale and enjoy it as an artful feminist thriller.
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54378-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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