Three brilliantly written short novels by a young Anglo-Indian author who has been praised throughout Great Britain as one of his generation’s finest prose stylists. And the reader immediately sees why in the opening pages of “A Strange and Sublime Address” (1991), which recounts in delightfully funny detail the perceptions of Sandeep, a ten-year-old boy from Calcutta whose family pays an extended visit to his uncle’s bustling and eccentric Bombay home, then returns a year and a half later to chart the progress of Uncle Chhotomama, a loony mixture of communist ideologue and failed businessman whom Salman Rushdie might have invented. The story is plotless; Chaudhuri simply presents a parade of gorgeous vignettes and tableaus filled with wondrously observed small moments (when a toddler takes one hesitant step, “its other leg forgot it was a leg, and the child, bewildered by its own body, collapsed in a soft heap”). “Afternoon Raag” (1993) depicts with comparable facility the confused sensibility of a music student (perhaps the grown-up Sandeep, though not specifically identified as him) at Oxford, poised uncertainly between the comforting world of his parents back in Bombay and the contrasting promises of two girl students he tells himself he loves. The piece is slight but beautifully done. The more ambitious “Freedom Song” (1995) examines the relations among two families living together temporarily in present-day Calcutta: Shib, who works in a British-owned chocolate factory, and his wife Xhuku; and then also Xhuku’s weirdly extended “family of ne’er-do-wells” whose communal raison d’àtre seems to be the need to arrange a proper marriage for Xhuku’s scandalous nephew Bhaskar, a devout communist who performs political street theater. The two families” ineffably comic, intrinsically melancholy interactions are rendered with quiet compassion in a tour de force that suggests an Indian Buddenbrooks in miniature. Some of the most accomplished fiction of the decade.
Pub Date: March 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-375-40427-9
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1999
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
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
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