An intelligent but rambling friendship tale set in Jerusalem.
In this novel, two Jewish childhood friends grow up together in Jerusalem after the Six-Day War, with their devotion to each other challenged by divergent cultural backgrounds.
Ben Haddad and Ofir Stern are best friends in Jerusalem during a politically tumultuous and uncertain time that accentuates cultural divides. Ben’s background is Sephardic and Ofir’s is Ashkenazi—the former group is known for its religious devotion and political conservatism, while the latter is famous for its intellectual sophistication and progressive liberalism. The two groups often find themselves at cultural loggerheads, with the Sephardi routinely feeling disenfranchised and discriminated against by the generally more financially well-off Ashkenazi. Ben and Ofir’s friendship weathers the typical boyhood rivalries over girls and academic honors, though each set of parents views the other with suspicion, a tension that particularly haunts Ben. In the wake of college—Ben becomes a computer scientist and Ofir, an economist—they found a company together, Handex, which produces robotic arms designed for medical purposes. But Ben can never cease to view Ofir not only with the envy of a competitive brother, but also with mistrust, and he begins to embezzle money from the company in order to support a lavish lifestyle. This crime becomes a profound source of shame for him and a catalyst that compels the two to embrace the distance between them, an emotional drama intelligently depicted by Barasch Rubinstein. The author announces her aim to capture the conflict between the Ashkenazi and Sephardic cultures in a prefatory note, and she achieves this with impressive lucidity and thoughtfulness. In addition, she does a marvelous job of bringing to vivid life the political and cultural landscape of Israel during terribly turbulent years. But the plot eventually becomes a bit desultory and sluggish—it seems to meander in search of more opportunities to display the cultural opposition that permeates the tale. Ultimately, the author seems more interested in didactically teaching readers about an element of Israeli life than crafting a compelling story.
An intelligent but rambling friendship tale set in Jerusalem.Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2024
ISBN: 9798887195056
Page Count: 270
Publisher: Academic Studies Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 6, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A masterpiece.
Two young Indian writers discover their conjoined destinies by leaving home, coming back, connecting, disconnecting, and swimming in the ocean at Goa.
Sonia’s grandfather, the lawyer, and his friend, the Colonel, are connected by a weekly chess game and a local tradition of families sharing food, “paraded through the neighborhood in tiffin carriers, in thermos flasks, upon plates covered in napkins tied in rabbit ears.” Shortly after Desai’s magnificent third novel opens, the two families are also connected by a marriage proposal. Upon hearing that Sonia is feeling lonely at college in Vermont—loneliness? Is there anything more un-Indian?—and unaware that she is romantically involved with a famous, much older painter, her elders deliver a hilariously lukewarm letter proposing that she be introduced to Sonny, the Colonel’s grandson. Sonny is living in New York working as a copy editor at The Associated Press, and he, too, has a partner no one knows about. Sonny’s family feels they are being asked to give up their son to balance out some long-ago bad investment advice from the Colonel; on the other hand, they would very much like to get the other family’s kebab recipe. The fate of this half-hearted setup unfurls over many years and almost 700 delicious pages that the author has apparently been working on since the publication of The Inheritance of Loss (2006), which won the Booker Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award. You can almost feel the decades passing as the novel becomes increasingly concerned with the process of novel-writing; toward the end, Sonia can’t stop thinking about whether, if she writes all the stories she knows, “these stories [would] intersect and make a book? How would they hold together?” Desai’s trust in her own process pays off, as vignettes of just a page or two (Sonia’s head-spinning tour of a museum with the great artist; Sonny’s lightning-strike theory that only people who have cleaned their own toilet can appreciate reading novels) intersect with the novel’s central obsessions—love, family, writing, the role of the U.S. in the Indian imagination, the dangers faced by a woman on her own—and come to a perfectly satisfying close.
A masterpiece.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2025
ISBN: 9780307700155
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: June 6, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
An emotionally acute study of manliness.
Scenes from the life of a well-off but emotionally damaged man.
Szalay’s sixth novel is a study of István, who as a 15-year-old in Hungary is lured into a sexual relationship with a married neighbor; when he has a confrontation with the woman’s husband, the man falls down the stairs and dies. Add in stints in a juvenile facility and as a soldier in Iraq, and István enters his 20s almost completely stunted emotionally. (Saying much besides “Okay” sometimes seems utterly beyond him.) Fueled by id, libido, and street drugs, he seems destined to be a casualty until, while working as a bouncer at a London strip club, he helps rescue the owner of a security firm who’s been assaulted; soon, he’s hired as the driver for a tycoon and his wife, with whom he begins an affair. István is a fascinating character in a kind of negative sense—he’s intriguing for all the ways he fails to confront his trauma, all the missed opportunities to find deeper connections. To that end, Szalay’s prose is emotionally bare, deliberately clipped and declarative, evoking István’s unwillingness (or incapacity) to look inside himself; he occasionally consults with a therapist, but a relentless passivity keeps him from opening up much. His capacity to fail upwards eventually catches up with him, and the novel becomes a more standard story about betrayal and inheritances, but it also turns on small but meaningful moments of heroism that suggest a deeper character than somebody who, as someone suggests, “exemplif[ies] a primitive form of masculinity.” István’s relentlessly stony approach to existence grates at times—there are a few too many “okay”s in the dialogue—but Szalay’s distanced approach has its payoffs. Being closed off, like István, doesn’t close off the world, and at times has tragic consequences.
An emotionally acute study of manliness.Pub Date: April 1, 2025
ISBN: 9781982122799
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: March 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2025
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