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
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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