A multilayered family portrait set in Calcutta, London, and Dhaka. Ghosh sets aside the magic realism of his first novel (The Circle of Reason, 1986) to train his sights directly on the imagination and on the way it illuminates family myths. The transforming events explored by the narrator, a fervent Calcutta-born academic, all take place off-screen: they've been described by Tridib, the narrator's intoxicating older cousin; by his grandmother in the years before her death; and by a heavy-set British friend, May Price. Tridib re-creates WW II London for his wide-eyed cousin: "Tridib had given me worlds to travel in and he had given me eyes to see them with," the narrator recalls years later. His grandmother's longings to revisit her birthplace, Dhaka, were equally palpable. When her grandfather died, her father and his brother feuded and divided the crooked house down the middle. Throughout her childhood, the grandmother and her sister spun fantasies of "the upside down house," where the meals started with sweets and everyone slept under the beds. The grandmother discovers, in 1962, that her uncle, now ancient, is still alive and living in the house, protected from post-Partition violence by a sympathetic Muslim family. But it's only through May, who'd accompanied Tridib and the grandmother on their pilgrimage back, that the details surface of the riot in which Tridib was killed. The logic of the narrative is fascinating if chronologically confusing: one memory unfolds into another, as the narrator greedily patches it all into the rich crazy-quilt of his own identity. But while the effects are showy, the story is real: the people are compelling, and the ways that global events push into lovingly choreographed private lives are deftly delineated. In all, a revealing—and rewarding—excavation of a family's memory lodes.
Pub Date: March 19, 1989
ISBN: 670-82633-2
Page Count: -
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
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
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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