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GUN ISLAND

Name: GUN ISLAND
Author: Amitav Ghosh
ISBN: 978-0-374-16739-4

by Amitav Ghosh ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 10, 2019

Ghosh’s story, involving and intricate, speaks urgently to a time growing ever more perilous.

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In the face of apocalyptic climate change, an Indian immigrant searches for the truth behind a Bengali legend.

Deen Datta travels each year from Brooklyn, where he works as a dealer in rare books and Asian antiquities, to his native Calcutta, “or Kolkata, as it is now formally known,” visiting family and scouting new purchases. As Ghosh’s (Flood of Fire, 2015, etc.) novel opens, a smart-alecky relative tells him the tale of a Bengali folk hero called the Gun Merchant, whose story is rooted in a shrine in the Sundarbans, ”a tiger-infested mangrove forest“ at the mouth of the Ganges. Another relative, an elderly woman who grew up in the islands, has more stories to tell—and so does Piya Roy, a young, female marine biologist who is studying the effects of climate change on whales and dolphins, once abundant in the storm-lashed Sundarbans. Deen is a collector not just of old things, but also of interesting friends from all over the world, such as the Italian scholar Giacinta Schiavon, who makes an urgent case for taking folktales seriously as descriptions of the world and auguries of things to come, even as Deen protests that he is ”a rational, secular, scientifically minded person.” There is good reason to beware of signs and portents, for even as the Sundarbans disappear beneath the rising sea and cobras strike unwary victims, places like Los Angeles are falling before a wall of fire, “a glowing snake hurtling towards me, through the flames,” while legions of displaced people are in flight, walking across continents, fleeing aboard boats “crowded with refugees.” Much of Deen’s story is a fictional rejoinder to Ghosh’s 2016 polemic, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, and, as with that book, blends elements of journalism, folklore, science, and history to describe a world on the verge of catastrophe—and one in which people, in the end, have nowhere to go.

Ghosh’s story, involving and intricate, speaks urgently to a time growing ever more perilous.

Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019

ISBN: 978-0-374-16739-4

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Review Posted Online: June 30, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019

Categories:

HISTORICAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
SMOKE AND ASHES
by Amitav Ghosh

- BOOK REVIEW
THE GREAT DERANGEMENT
by Amitav Ghosh

- BOOK REVIEW
FLOOD OF FIRE
by Amitav Ghosh

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WE WERE THE LUCKY ONES

by Georgia Hunter ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 14, 2017

Too beholden to sentimentality and cliché, this novel fails to establish a uniquely realized perspective.

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Hunter’s debut novel tracks the experiences of her family members during the Holocaust.

Sol and Nechuma Kurc, wealthy, cultured Jews in Radom, Poland, are successful shop owners; they and their grown children live a comfortable lifestyle. But that lifestyle is no protection against the onslaught of the Holocaust, which eventually scatters the members of the Kurc family among several continents. Genek, the oldest son, is exiled with his wife to a Siberian gulag. Halina, youngest of all the children, works to protect her family alongside her resistance-fighter husband. Addy, middle child, a composer and engineer before the war breaks out, leaves Europe on one of the last passenger ships, ending up thousands of miles away. Then, too, there are Mila and Felicia, Jakob and Bella, each with their own share of struggles—pain endured, horrors witnessed. Hunter conducted extensive research after learning that her grandfather (Addy in the book) survived the Holocaust. The research shows: her novel is thorough and precise in its details. It’s less precise in its language, however, which frequently relies on cliché. “You’ll get only one shot at this,” Halina thinks, enacting a plan to save her husband. “Don’t botch it.” Later, Genek, confronting a routine bit of paperwork, must decide whether or not to hide his Jewishness. “That form is a deal breaker,” he tells himself. “It’s life and death.” And: “They are low, it seems, on good fortune. And something tells him they’ll need it.” Worse than these stale phrases, though, are the moments when Hunter’s writing is entirely inadequate for the subject matter at hand. Genek, describing the gulag, calls the nearest town “a total shitscape.” This is a low point for Hunter’s writing; elsewhere in the novel, it’s stronger. Still, the characters remain flat and unknowable, while the novel itself is predictable. At this point, more than half a century’s worth of fiction and film has been inspired by the Holocaust—a weighty and imposing tradition. Hunter, it seems, hasn’t been able to break free from her dependence on it.

Too beholden to sentimentality and cliché, this novel fails to establish a uniquely realized perspective.

Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2017

ISBN: 978-0-399-56308-9

Page Count: 416

Publisher: Viking

Review Posted Online: Nov. 21, 2016

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2016

Categories:

RELIGIOUS FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION

- BOOK TO SCREEN
Hulu’s ‘We Were the Lucky Ones’ Adds To Cast

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THE UNSEEN

by Roy Jacobsen ; translated by Don Bartlett & Don Shaw ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 7, 2020

A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.

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Norwegian novelist Jacobsen folds a quietly powerful coming-of-age story into a rendition of daily life on one of Norway’s rural islands a hundred years ago in a novel that was shortlisted for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize.

Ingrid Barrøy, her father, Hans, mother, Maria, grandfather Martin, and slightly addled aunt Barbro are the owners and sole inhabitants of Barrøy Island, one of numerous small family-owned islands in an area of Norway barely touched by the outside world. The novel follows Ingrid from age 3 through a carefree early childhood of endless small chores, simple pleasures, and unquestioned familial love into her more ambivalent adolescence attending school off the island and becoming aware of the outside world, then finally into young womanhood when she must make difficult choices. Readers will share Ingrid’s adoration of her father, whose sense of responsibility conflicts with his romantic nature. He adores Maria, despite what he calls her “la-di-da” ways, and is devoted to Ingrid. Twice he finds work on the mainland for his sister, Barbro, but, afraid she’ll be unhappy, he brings her home both times. Rooted to the land where he farms and tied to the sea where he fishes, Hans struggles to maintain his family’s hardscrabble existence on an island where every repair is a struggle against the elements. But his efforts are Sisyphean. Life as a Barrøy on Barrøy remains precarious. Changes do occur in men’s and women’s roles, reflected in part by who gets a literal chair to sit on at meals, while world crises—a war, Sweden’s financial troubles—have unexpected impact. Yet the drama here occurs in small increments, season by season, following nature’s rhythm through deaths and births, moments of joy and deep sorrow. The translator’s decision to use roughly translated phrases in conversation—i.e., “Tha’s goen’ nohvar” for "You’re going nowhere")—slows the reading down at first but ends up drawing readers more deeply into the world of Barrøy and its prickly, intensely alive inhabitants.

A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.