A suspenseful romance between a Hindu and a Muslim, and a nerve-racking historical tale.
An ambitious novel presents a tragic story of love and strife during Bangladesh’s Liberation War.
Two idealistic students discover just how dirty a game politics can be in this romantic thriller from Havel (Charlie Zero’s Last-Ditch Attempt, 2014). Readers meet Amina Mitra and Raja Gupta in 1969, optimistic college students from the first generation born after East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) and West Pakistan were partitioned from India after World War II. They meet on registration day at Dhaka University, join the nationalist cause, and gradually fall in love. But there are obstacles (“Dating wasn’t an option in East Pakistan. The children simply grew to a certain age, and then their parents gave them away to the husband of their choosing”). To make matters worse, Raja is Hindu and Amina is Muslim; in the charged political atmosphere of a revolutionary land, simply holding hands on the street is sufficient to land them in jail, or worse. Both are political idealists, working to gradually liberate the nation of their birth from the manipulative and homogenizing influence of Islamabad, but Bangladesh is a small country trapped between the conflicting interests of the major powers during the Cold War. (Pakistan is President Richard Nixon’s door to China—the weapons Amina and Raja fear falling prey to are American-made.) As their romance deepens, the young couple find their idealism manipulated, the worlds of politics and spycraft both cogs in “a multi-layered machine that already understood that human beings were essentially animals and had to be controlled whenever their chain of command saw fit.” As Havel leads his readers from idyllic Bengali villages and cruel interrogation cubes to paradisiacal Calcutta hotels and the hidden slums of Mecca, he presents not only vivid personalities, but a compelling vision of history as well. At one point, Raja muses about the Indians and Pakistanis: “The Indians seemed happier, while the Pakistanis were always paranoid of India’s culture. India appeared to be living in peace, while Pakistan existed in a perpetual state of war and unrest.” Havel understands how the abstruse mechanizations of geopolitical brinksmanship can influence everything, from whispering lovers to struggling nations. Readers should feel caught up in the events of half a century ago as though they were happening now (which, in some impoverished country, they assuredly are).
A suspenseful romance between a Hindu and a Muslim, and a nerve-racking historical tale.Pub Date: Dec. 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-63508-040-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: America Star Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 28, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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