With just the right blend of empathy and intelligence, Desai (Baumgartner's Bombay, 1989) explores the West's long fascination with Indian spirituality via the story of a European couple who, like so many in the '70s, sought enlightenment in the subcontinent. When Sophie visits her ailing husband, Matteo, in an Indian hospital and begs him to return to Italy to be with her and their two children, Matteo refuses. ``You will leave, Sophie, but not I,'' he tells her. By this time they've been in India for several years, it's the mid-80s, and Sophie now understands that their children no longer matter to him: ``They were what we had left behind.'' Desai's narrative moves from continent to continent and back and forth in time, following the couple up to this impasse and beyond. In many ways, the story is also a brief, for Desai is assembling a case for understanding why people like Matteo, a child of European privilege and the 1960s, chose to go on pilgrimage, to ``journey to Ithaca.'' His unhappy childhood, and his own children's unease with their conventional grandparents, suggest some reasons for his desperate search for spiritual peace. Skeptical Sophie, on the other hand, goes to India simply because she loves her husband and thinks ``the possibilities...endless and fascinating.'' After a few years, however, the squalor they live in, the drug-crazed hippies they meet, the charlatans they're gulled byalong with Matteo's increasing estrangement from her, and his ever-greater attachment to ``Mother,'' a charismatic guruall send Sophie on a journey of her own. Determined to prove the Mother a fraud, she travels to Egypt, Europe, and the US, returning to India only to find the truth more troubling and complex than she imagined. Still, Sophie must keep traveling: the Mother is now dead, and Matteo has disappeared.... A splendidly nuanced evocation, never credulous or dismissive of those impelled to go on pilgrimage: Pilgrim's Progress updated and uprooted, but still as compelling.
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-679-43900-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1995
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
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