Beautifully composed, but a journey into the past more notable for the travel than the destination. (Tamarind Woman is...
An evocation of the past in luminous prose doesn’t quite save a thin story about a sharp-tongued mother and a homesick daughter who find understanding and redemption though continents apart.
Kamini, a successful academic, is living in Calgary, Canada. She calls her mother in India each Sunday, wanting to reminisce, but her mother Saroja, known as the Tamarind Woman because of her acid tongue, merely wants to argue and dispute every memory Kamini has. As Kamini shares her worries with Sister Roopa, she recalls their growing-up days as children of the railway. Their father was an engineer, and they were posted all over India, living in railway housing, each compound with its own club and hierarchy. Kamini remembers her parents’ frequent quarrels, her mother’s palpable unhappiness when their father was home, her playful and indulgent mood when he was away. But Kamini also recalls the frequent nighttime visits to their home by a handsome, half-caste mechanic who later committed suicide in the club billiards room; and the early death of her father, which ended their lives in railway housing. Saroja takes up the second part of the story, and, as she travels around India by train, offers her defense. She’d wanted to be a doctor, but her reactionary father insisted she marry a much older man, who treated her coldly though he was good to her children. As she recalls her past, she admits some responsibility for her unhappiness and suggests that Kamini should move on, make new memories and stop fretting about her, for she has reached “that stage in life where I only turn the pages already written, I do not write.”
Beautifully composed, but a journey into the past more notable for the travel than the destination. (Tamarind Woman is Montreal-based Badami's first novel; for her second, the prizewinning The Hero’s Walk, see p. 199.)Pub Date: March 29, 2002
ISBN: 1-56512-335-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2001
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
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
