The contradictions of colonialism permeate a story that, like the best historical fiction, envelops you in its world. Ghosh...
Solid, old-fashioned historical fiction that careens through the century, embracing a cast of characters whose lives unfold so gracefully that before you know it you’ve also witnessed the tragic tale of modern Burma, a country destroyed by colonialism and its aftermath.
The Indian-born Ghosh (The Calcutta Chromosome, 1997, etc.) is too subtle a writer to simply rage against Empire, which, as the British constantly remind everyone here, brings modernity to the subcontinent. But this lyrical and focused narrative finds its origins in a simpler time: an 11-year-old Indian boy in Mandalay first glimpses a young beauty, a servant in the palace of the Burmese king. A resilient and determined orphan, Rajkumar apprentices himself to a wise and friendly Asian teak dealer, who helps him develop the fortune that will reunite Rajkumar with his beloved Dolly, who follows the Royal Family into exile in India after the 1885 British invasion. History plays out against this grand passion, rather than the other way around: Rajkumar grows wealthy from his investments in Malaysian rubber during WWI; Dolly’s friend Uma becomes a leader in the radical Indian Independence Union; the Burmese riot against the Indians, complicating the various intermarriages; and, most importantly, WWII pits everyone against the invading Japanese, and, later, family against family, when the mutinous Indians fight the British loyalists. The novel is no history lesson, though, since Ghosh integrates his research with immense skill, making real events have consequences for his invented characters. And there is always the pulse of human life: the births and deaths, the loves and betrayals, the rises and falls—all spread over generations of Rajkumar’s family, and even connecting to the present state of affairs in Myanmar.
The contradictions of colonialism permeate a story that, like the best historical fiction, envelops you in its world. Ghosh seamlessly blends ideas about the power of the photographic image with unforgettable descriptions of nature—in a thoroughly enjoyable, intelligent epic that’s bound to win him a wide and grateful readership.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2001
ISBN: 0-375-50148-7
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2000
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
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SEEN & HEARD
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