A hard-edged collection of finely wrought stories.
In this short story collection, Rashidi (The Outcast, 2014) offers dark tales of rural Iran.
The setting of Rashidi’s fiction is one of meager village life, characterized by the ubiquitous “dust, bits of hay and the stench of dung.” In “Galeen Khanum,” a young girl is forced into an early marriage with a local lord, and the trauma of the consummation leads her to an unhealthy fascination with Islamic promises of the afterlife. In “Ashura,” a peasant boy has a disturbing first experience with the eponymous holy day, during which men lament the memory of the ancient Battle of Karbala by shedding their own blood with cleavers. In “Omar Koshan,” a family attends a yearly festival, the “rowdiest of carnivals, initiated by religious hatred, ever held anywhere in the history of humankind.” Ostensibly an occasion to burn an effigy of Caliph Omar the Cursed, the festival devolves into a chaotic excuse for insults and score-settling. Each of the 16 stories explores the intersection between the individual and an oppressive, tradition-dominated society: the people, lacking the language or vision to transcend the weight of inherited culture, generally come away worse for the encounter. Rashidi is an adept chronicler of village color; his tales are full of gossiping women in flowery chadors, scampering children, destitute beggars, dancing gypsies, scheming mullahs, and old men lazing with their chibouks and opium pipes. The world he creates is so detailed and frenetic that it feels like a documentary, not historical fiction. Most stunning of all is that Rashidi makes no attempt to romanticize the past: the livestock and excrement, the cold and dust, the threat of dangerous neighbors and of the wilderness outside the village make his Iran a legitimately unsettling locale. He doesn’t try to psychoanalyze his characters through a modern lens, but he’s clearly interested in the traumatic effects that the hierarchy and ritual of this world have on its inhabitants, particularly the children. The context of religious and ethnic history is often lost on the characters, if it’s even explained; even so, the ripples of tradition, embodied in the wealthy, the ordained, and the mad, influence their lives in ways that they cannot escape.
A hard-edged collection of finely wrought stories.Pub Date: Jan. 21, 2014
ISBN: 978-1629211664
Page Count: 302
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
Sisters in and out of love.
Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45073-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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