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A KITCHEN IN THE CORNER OF THE HOUSE

Name: A KITCHEN IN THE CORNER OF THE HOUSE
Author: Ambai
ISBN: 978-1-939810-44-1

by Ambai ; translated by Lakshmi Holmström ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 17, 2019

Fresh, graceful stories create a palpable world.

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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

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION | SHORT STORIES

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ANIMAL FARM

A FAIRY STORY

by George Orwell ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 26, 1946

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A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.

Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946

ISBN: 0452277507

Page Count: 114

Publisher: Harcourt, Brace

Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
GEORGE ORWELL
by George Orwell ; edited by Peter Davison

- BOOK REVIEW
DIARIES
by George Orwell & edited by Peter Davison

- BOOK REVIEW
ALL ART IS PROPAGANDA
by George Orwell

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THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

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The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.