Begins well with a challenging premise, then slips into conventional sentimentality.
Slim first novel about an Indian woman haunted by the Bhopal tragedy.
Waiting at the Bhopal train station for her husband Prakash to pick her up, young Anjali could never have guessed that his forgetfulness would alter the shape of her life. Suddenly the air is unbreathable, and Anjali almost dies in one of the worst industrial accidents of the 20th century. Nearly 15 years later, she sees Prakash for the first time in many years, and the past begins to intrude on the new life she's built. In flashback, we see Anjali as a naive young woman being introduced to dashing army officer Prakash; a match is made the same evening, and a wedding date is set. Wanting to be a good, traditional Indian wife, Anjali is shocked that their marriage hardly resembles those in romantic films. Prakash treats her poorly and cheats on her; all her fine meals and sweet smiles don't win him over. After the Bhopal accident, she does the unthinkable for a woman of her culture and gets a divorce. Anjali goes back to college, becomes independent, marries gentle Sandeep, and bears his child. But Amar is born with heart and lung problems, results of Bhopal, and when Anjali sees Prakash again, her well-kept resentments tumble out. He is to blame for her 12-year-old son's illness; he is prosperous while she leads a modest life; she bears the stigma of being a divorcée in a society whose women are expected to submit to their husbands’ will. All this is absorbing stuff, particularly Anjali's struggles as a contemporary woman in India, though Malladi falters when she leaves Anjali's narrative and takes up the voices of Prakash and Sandeep. Their perspectives (Prakash is repentant, Sandeep understanding) add little to the story and ultimately detract from Anjali’s intimate portrait of her life.
Begins well with a challenging premise, then slips into conventional sentimentality.Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-345-45028-0
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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