Quibbles, these, nonetheless. Chaudhuri has given us an immensely revealing and engagingly readable introduction to a...
Another fine collection, comparable to Vintage’s recent volumes of Scottish and Latin American fiction, and that rarest of contemporary publishing rarities: a real bargain.
The Anglo-Indian author of Real Time (p. 120) has assembled 38 examples of fiction and nonfiction prose ranging from the early-19th century through the contemporary period and representing Bengali, Hindi, Urdu, and English literatures. Several of its earlier entries demonstrate that (as Chaudhuri’s eloquent introduction and headnotes to individual selections attest) we in the West tend to know a little about trendy writers of the moment like Salman Rushdie and Arundhati Roy, and virtually nothing about such important forerunners as India’s only Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore (represented by his limpid short story “The Postmaster” and charming “Essay on Nursery Rhymes”); Sukumar Ray (author of the delightful animal fable “A Topsy Turvy Tale”); and Bibhuti Bhusan Banerjee (whose famous novel of childhood Pather Panchali inspired the “World of Apu” trilogy of Sukumar Ray’s son, celebrated filmmaker Satyajit Ray). The remarkable R.K. Narayan is represented by a pungent excerpt from his wry nostalgic novel The English Teacher, and Chaudhuri also offers self-contained chunks from Raja Rao’s important novel of exile, The Serpent and the Rope, and Nirad C. Chaudhuri’s seminal Autobiography of an Unknown Indian. Conversely, do we really need large dollops of Sunetra Gupta’s pedestrian Memories of Rain, Vikram Seth’s distinctively un-Indian verse narrative The Golden Gate, and the exceedingly well-known Midnight’s Children? One of Rushdie’s elegant short stories might better have been chosen, to set aside such gems as the pseudonymous Premchand’s Borgesian-Nabokovian classic “The Chess Players” (also filmed by Satyajit Ray), Nirmal Verma’s disturbing “Terminal,” and Naiger Masud’s Kafkaesque “Sheesha Ghat.” One further cavil: Why nothing from Rohinton Mistry, whose award-winning novels have virtually reinvented the Victorian family chronicle?
Quibbles, these, nonetheless. Chaudhuri has given us an immensely revealing and engagingly readable introduction to a literature whose evident riches will lure many readers to further exploration.Pub Date: June 18, 2002
ISBN: 0-375-71300-X
Page Count: 672
Publisher: Vintage
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
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
PERSPECTIVES
Not as thematically ambitious as Whitehead’s earlier work, but a whole lot of fun to read.
Another surprise from an author who never writes the same novel twice.
Though Whitehead has earned considerable critical acclaim for his earlier work—in particular his debut (The Intuitionist, 1999) and its successor (John Henry Days, 2001)—he’ll likely reach a wider readership with his warmest novel to date. Funniest as well, though there have been flashes of humor throughout his writing. The author blurs the line between fiction and memoir as he recounts the coming-of-age summer of 15-year-old Benji Cooper in the family’s summer retreat of New York’s Sag Harbor. “According to the world, we were the definition of paradox: black boys with beach houses,” writes Whitehead. Caucasians are only an occasional curiosity within this idyll, and parents are mostly absent as well. Each chapter is pretty much a self-contained entity, corresponding to a rite of passage: getting the first job, negotiating the mysteries of the opposite sex. There’s an accident with a BB gun and plenty of episodes of convincing someone older to buy beer, but not much really happens during this particular summer. Yet by the end of it, Benji is well on his way to becoming Ben, and he realizes that he is a different person than when the summer started. He also realizes that this time in his life will eventually live only in memory. There might be some distinctions between Benji and Whitehead, though the novelist also spent his youthful summers in Sag Harbor and was the same age as Benji in 1985, when the novel is set. Yet the first-person narrator has the novelist’s eye for detail, craft of character development and analytical instincts for sharp social commentary.
Not as thematically ambitious as Whitehead’s earlier work, but a whole lot of fun to read.Pub Date: April 28, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-385-52765-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2009
BOOK TO SCREEN
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