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
Genetically engineered dinosaurs run amok in Crichton's new, vastly entertaining science thriller. From the introduction alone—a classically Crichton-clear discussion of the implications of biotechnological research—it's evident that the Harvard M.D. has bounced back from the science-fantasy silliness of Sphere (1987) for another taut reworking of the Frankenstein theme, as in The Andromeda Strain and The Terminal Man. Here, Dr. Frankenstein is aging billionaire John Hammond, whose monster is a manmade ecosystem based on a Costa Rican island. Designed as the world's ultimate theme park, the ecosystem boasts climate and flora of the Jurassic Age and—most spectacularly—15 varieties of dinosaurs, created by elaborate genetic engineering that Crichton explains in fascinating detail, rich with dino-lore and complete with graphics. Into the park, for a safety check before its opening, comes the novel's band of characters—who, though well drawn, double as symbolic types in this unsubtle morality play. Among them are hero Alan Grant, noble paleontologist; Hammond, venal and obsessed; amoral dino-designer Henry Wu; Hammond's two innocent grandchildren; and mathematician Ian Malcolm, who in long diatribes serves as Crichton's mouthpiece to lament the folly of science. Upon arrival, the visitors tour the park; meanwhile, an industrial spy steals some dino embryos by shutting down the island's power—and its security grid, allowing the beasts to run loose. The bulk of the remaining narrative consists of dinos—ferocious T. Rex's, voracious velociraptors, venom-spitting dilophosaurs—stalking, ripping, and eating the cast in fast, furious, and suspenseful set-pieces as the ecosystem spins apart. And can Grant prevent the dinos from escaping to the mainland to create unchecked havoc? Though intrusive, the moralizing rarely slows this tornado-paced tale, a slick package of info-thrills that's Crichton's most clever since Congo (1980)—and easily the most exciting dinosaur novel ever written. A sure-fire best-seller.
Pub Date: Nov. 7, 1990
ISBN: 0394588169
Page Count: 424
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1990
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
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