Poetic flights and jests meld uneasily with didacticism in this ambitious, uneven fantasy.
An episodic, magical-realist parable set in Bombay.
Form is at least a partial substitute for content in Irani’s debut. The storyline traces the unnamed narrator’s quest to understand how he came to lose his arm, but it’s a modern dreamscape, with strands of narrative coherence strewn across stretches of semi-opaque hallucination. Before becoming “a novice cripple,” the central figure lived a privileged life in an apartment by the sea. He drank whiskey, slept with prostitutes—in particular Malaika, whom he claimed to love—never prayed or worked. But since waking up two months ago minus one arm, he has become a lost soul, relocated to a sinking apartment block and driven to seeking direction from misfits and underdogs on the streets. A floating beggar, a woman selling rainbows, and a leper who gives him a finger are among the many characters who offer advice; several mention one Baba Rakhu. The actual and metaphorical journey moves through time as well as space, always with heavy nudges toward atonement. “You need to earn your arm back,” says Baba Rakhu when finally unearthed in his “pet dungeon,” a repository of severed limbs taken from the unworthy (wife-beaters, for example). Persistent flashbacks to schooldays feature rivalry with a clever boy named Viren, whom the narrator first nearly blinded, then maimed by feeding his hand into a machine. He seeks out Viren, now a successful novelist, and finds he has not been forgiven. Looking next for Malaika, the narrator reveals he beat her up a year ago; soon he learns that she died the next day. Connections among the central figure’s justified self-loathing, random viciousness and recent amputation finally fall into place, and he returns to Baba Rakhu to accept the sacrifice of his arm as a means of rejecting his old self.
Poetic flights and jests meld uneasily with didacticism in this ambitious, uneven fantasy.Pub Date: May 6, 2005
ISBN: 1-56512-456-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2005
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.
Norwegian novelist Jacobsen folds a quietly powerful coming-of-age story into a rendition of daily life on one of Norway’s rural islands a hundred years ago in a novel that was shortlisted for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize.
Ingrid Barrøy, her father, Hans, mother, Maria, grandfather Martin, and slightly addled aunt Barbro are the owners and sole inhabitants of Barrøy Island, one of numerous small family-owned islands in an area of Norway barely touched by the outside world. The novel follows Ingrid from age 3 through a carefree early childhood of endless small chores, simple pleasures, and unquestioned familial love into her more ambivalent adolescence attending school off the island and becoming aware of the outside world, then finally into young womanhood when she must make difficult choices. Readers will share Ingrid’s adoration of her father, whose sense of responsibility conflicts with his romantic nature. He adores Maria, despite what he calls her “la-di-da” ways, and is devoted to Ingrid. Twice he finds work on the mainland for his sister, Barbro, but, afraid she’ll be unhappy, he brings her home both times. Rooted to the land where he farms and tied to the sea where he fishes, Hans struggles to maintain his family’s hardscrabble existence on an island where every repair is a struggle against the elements. But his efforts are Sisyphean. Life as a Barrøy on Barrøy remains precarious. Changes do occur in men’s and women’s roles, reflected in part by who gets a literal chair to sit on at meals, while world crises—a war, Sweden’s financial troubles—have unexpected impact. Yet the drama here occurs in small increments, season by season, following nature’s rhythm through deaths and births, moments of joy and deep sorrow. The translator’s decision to use roughly translated phrases in conversation—i.e., “Tha’s goen’ nohvar” for "You’re going nowhere")—slows the reading down at first but ends up drawing readers more deeply into the world of Barrøy and its prickly, intensely alive inhabitants.
A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-77196-319-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Biblioasis
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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