Relentlessly depressing and grim, Rai’s book offers an array of unlikable characters against a backdrop that would make...
Rai’s novel takes readers to an India where women are little more than a commodity and burden and life is a daily struggle.
Mamta is old to be marrying. At 20, with a disfiguring facial birthmark, she has known nothing but deprivation and scorn her entire life. Her father hates her so much that once she became betrothed, he ordered her mother to feed her only enough to keep her alive. Her conception brings back only pain and bitter memories to her mother. Mamta remembers nothing but deep poverty in the rural village where she has lived since birth. But all of that changes for her, or at least she hopes it will change, when she is finally to be married. In her part of India, where most girls are symbolically wed at age 8 and taken to the marriage bed as soon as they start menstruating, Mamta is an oddity. She has dreamt about the day her prince will come for her on a fine horse, but when he does show up, he is anything but a prince. Like the other men in her life, her new husband is no bargain. When Mamta dons her red wedding dress for the ceremony, she discovers she has traded one terrible life for another. Soon, she is given a choice and she makes it, but that decision only haunts her over the coming years. Rai, a journalist, writes with deep understanding of the poverty and pain of women whose lives are literally at the mercy of men. Although she is skilled, she also tends to be longwinded and her story meanders, leaving the reader wondering what one passage has to do with other. She has also populated her tale with a dizzying amount of characters: Readers will have to stay on their toes to sort them out.
Relentlessly depressing and grim, Rai’s book offers an array of unlikable characters against a backdrop that would make Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm grab a bottle of antidepressants.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-06-200035-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Perennial/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 2, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2010
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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
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