A promising debut, though it lacks Monica Ali’s wisdom or Irvine Welsh’s grit.
Meet London’s new angry young men: dissatisfied, tough-talking children of South Asian descent.
Like Jhumpa Lahiri and Monica Ali, first-time novelist Malkani wants to investigate how South Asians balance old and new identities while living in the West. Malkani’s more willing to play the subject for laughs, though, and Jas is a shade funkier than Lahiri and Ali’s heroes: A 19-year-old student living in a scruffier part of London, he’s desperately eager to fit in and prove himself a true desi, or South Asian. What’s a true desi? In Jas’s world it means a disdain for “gora” (white) culture but a carefully cultivated contempt for mom and dad’s favorite Bollywood movies; an obsession with flashy cars and hip bhangra music; and a willingness to deliver the occasional beat-down to prove your mettle. It also involves not getting a crush on attractive Muslim girls like Samira, but Jas begins pursuing a relationship with her on the sly and hopes that Hardjit, the alpha dog of his group of friends and a hard-liner about crossing such lines, never finds out. In the meantime, Hardjit and Jas help run an illicit cell-phone reselling operation; their schoolmaster’s efforts to mainstream and rehabilitate the young men leads them to Sanjay, a well-off Londoner who turns out to be even more corrupt. Malkani convincingly evokes Jas’s swaggering, obscenity-rich patois, and as a journalist at the Financial Times, he has an excellent feel for the economics of both the illegal cell-phone trade and London life in general. Better still, the novel concludes with a clever plot twist that upends the notions of identity and race Jas spends the novel struggling with. It’s almost enough to make you forget that, despite those strengths, much of the book is a conventional coming-of-age story about a kid aching for the stability of friendship—or at least a date.
A promising debut, though it lacks Monica Ali’s wisdom or Irvine Welsh’s grit.Pub Date: June 26, 2006
ISBN: 1-59420-097-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2006
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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