An entertaining kaleidoscope of tales focusing on contemporary Sri Lanka.
A collection of short stories set in Sri Lanka explores the convoluted inner lives of varied characters.
In order to keep her pregnancy a secret, a rape victim must go through the further indignity of giving birth in her parents’ home assisted by her doctor father. A woman wakes up from a night of lovemaking, checks her phone, and sees a news alert about how the local at-large serial killer is reported to have a devil mask tattoo on his chest—a tattoo just like the one on the chest of the man lying in bed next to her. A mother whose son is embarrassed by their poverty attends his cricket games dressed as Eliza Doolittle: “She wore white gloves and carried an umbrella with frills that she stitched herself using old napkins. She also made sandwiches for all the other parents and kids, which people were kind enough to eat even though they were filled with rubbery cuts of meat.” In this collection of 15 interconnected stories, Tenduf-La (Panther, 2015, etc.) follows the lives of average people struggling to survive in the chaotic and colorful capital city of Colombo in Sri Lanka. The author finds a delicate balance of humorous situations and real-world darkness, as in the title story, in which a shy gym trainer becomes overly infatuated with one of his clients—to the point where he watches her outside her window at night, jealous of the love she holds for her infant daughter. Tenduf-La writes in an even-tempered prose that manages to make dramatic situations slightly cartoonish and gives casual occurrences literary weight: “Pasindu Amarasinghe is a closet homosexual with six toes on his left foot,” he writes at the beginning of the story “Everyone Has to Eat,” “but the one thing he never wants his friends to find out is that he’s been allocated a university application fee waiver.” The mix of specific details from daily life in Colombo—where sari-clad Buddhist women exist shoulder to shoulder with mob enforcers—with the universal themes of loneliness, failure, and liberation makes for a memorable and enjoyable work from this talented writer.
An entertaining kaleidoscope of tales focusing on contemporary Sri Lanka.Pub Date: May 17, 2017
ISBN: 978-93-82616-92-4
Page Count: 163
Publisher: Pan Macmillan India
Review Posted Online: March 29, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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