A touching, very simple tale made all the more powerful by its lack of artifice.
A Sri Lankan first-novelist, now based in Northamptonshire, describes the travails of a poor Saudi peasant who moves to the city to earn a living.
Originally self-published in 1999 in England, Chandraratna’s story (see above) became a great critical success in Britain and was nearly short-listed for the Booker Prize. It takes us into the harsh yet beautiful world of Sayeed, a simple Muslim farmer in an unnamed Middle Eastern country (clearly Saudi Arabia) who leaves his ancestral village to take a job as a hospital porter in the big city. Unused to urban life, Sayeed is unhappy among the crowds of strangers and foreigners thronging the streets each day, but he works hard and is able to save much more money than he could ever have earned at home. He works so hard, in fact, that his brother Mustafa worries he may soon be too old to marry. So Mustafa arranges a wedding for Sayeed to Latifah, a beautiful young widow from a good family, and Sayeed agrees to the match. Soon he and Latifah are wed, and Sayeed returns to the city with his new family (including Latifah’s little girl Leila). Sayeed had to borrow money for the wedding, and he now needs to work harder than ever to pay back the debt and provide for his wife and stepdaughter, but he is happy and proud of his new status as husband and father. The city, however, is full of new tensions: The increasing number of foreign workers (often well-paid technocrats from non-Muslim countries) who don’t share the local traditions has created a backlash among Islamic fundamentalists. Attempts to enforce traditional codes of behavior have become more and more strident—and women are under great scrutiny to conform to the old ways. Sayeed is no reformer by any stretch, but he soon finds his newfound happiness threatened—and eventually destroyed—by the backlash.
A touching, very simple tale made all the more powerful by its lack of artifice.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2003
ISBN: 1-57423-196-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Black Sparrow/Godine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
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
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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