Chaudhuri’s prose is unfailingly eloquent, but this prim novel’s virtually plotless restraint repeatedly reduces drama to...
A subtly detailed picture of life in Bombay before it became Mumbai distinguishes this resolutely lyrical fifth novel from the internationally acclaimed Anglo-Indian author (A New World, 2000, etc.).
The book incorporates an interlocking chain of contrasts between two temperamentally opposed protagonists, their families and the eternally opposed polarities of art and commerce. Shyam Lal, arriving at young manhood in the early 1980s, is a classically trained music tutor and vocal coach who has swerved from the path trod by his father, a much admired singer. “Shyamji” has tuned into contemporary culture, “tak[ing] advantage of the musical currency of the day, of the songs with which a middle class… expressed its dreams.” Though Shyamji prospers most by indulging wealthy females in their pursuit of celebrity (think Slumdog Millionaire on a higher social level), he agrees to tutor the teenaged son (Nirmalaya) of wealthy Mallika Sengupta, still resentful that she sublimated her own musical gifts to perform as the obedient wife of a locally renowned corporate executive. As Shyamji balances his tutorial duties against carefully thought-out career moves, Nirmalya rebels, declaring pop music empty nonsense and demanding education in India’s classical traditions (he’ll eventually leave his homeland to study philosophy abroad). There’s potential conflict here, but Chaudhuri softens every sharp angle, eschewing drama for a Dutch-interior succession of luminous visual and verbal images that chart the fading of Bombay’s colorful elegance (e.g., when a popular café goes out of business, part of a culture seems lost forever) and the compromised integrity of fleetingly involved secondary characters (including Nirmalaya’s ill-fated father Apura, and his posturing superior, an Englishman who “loves India while helping to appropriate and reshape it”).
Chaudhuri’s prose is unfailingly eloquent, but this prim novel’s virtually plotless restraint repeatedly reduces drama to flat statement. We feel we know each word, because we’ve heard these songs before.Pub Date: Aug. 26, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-307-27022-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2009
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.
The time is the not-so-distant future, when the US's spiraling social freedoms have finally called down a reaction, an Iranian-style repressive "monotheocracy" calling itself the Republic of Gilead—a Bible-thumping, racist, capital-punishing, and misogynistic rule that would do away with pleasure altogether were it not for one thing: that the Gileadan women, pure and true (as opposed to all the nonbelieving women, those who've ever been adulterous or married more than once), are found rarely fertile.
Thus are drafted a whole class of "handmaids," whose function is to bear the children of the elite, to be fecund or else (else being certain death, sent out to be toxic-waste removers on outlying islands). The narrative frame for Atwood's dystopian vision is the hopeless private testimony of one of these surrogate mothers, Offred ("of" plus the name of her male protector). Lying cradled by the body of the barren wife, being meanwhile serviced by the husband, Offred's "ceremony" must be successful—if she does not want to join the ranks of the other disappeared (which include her mother, her husband—dead—and small daughter, all taken away during the years of revolt). One Of her only human conduits is a gradually developing affair with her master's chauffeur—something that's balanced more than offset, though, by the master's hypocritically un-Puritan use of her as a kind of B-girl at private parties held by the ruling men in a spirit of nostalgia and lust. This latter relationship, edging into real need (the master's), is very effectively done; it highlights the handmaid's (read Everywoman's) eternal exploitation, profane or sacred ("We are two-legged wombs, that's all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices"). Atwood, to her credit, creates a chillingly specific, imaginable night-mare. The book is short on characterization—this is Atwood, never a warm writer, at her steeliest—and long on cynicism—it's got none of the human credibility of a work such as Walker Percy's Love In The Ruins. But the scariness is visceral, a world that's like a dangerous and even fatal grid, an electrified fence.
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 1985
ISBN: 038549081X
Page Count: -
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1985
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
