A neat concept that goes inert in the execution.
First novel by a South African–born Indian now in the US: a would-be witty comedy of love and manners chronicling a courtship and marriage inspired by the author’s own immigrant grandparents.
There is a promising premise to the story, one that goes back to Shakespeare: The shrewish woman who, forced by family to marry, eventually falls in love with her masterful spouse. Coovadia begins well, describing how Ismet Nassain, traveling through rural India by train in the late 1800s, is touched by an angel. The angel makes him fall in love with a young villager, Khateja Jhaveri, who is standing on the platform as the train pulls in. Nassain is compelled to track down the woman and propose marriage. Though Khateja’s family at first pretends to resist the proposal, they are secretly delighted to find a suitor for a daughter who has always been strong-willed and cantankerous. Threatened with marriage to the village idiot unless she marries Nassain, she reluctantly agrees but is determined to free herself as soon as she can. She fiercely resists Nassain’s well-intentioned blandishments but, smitten, he is patient and tolerant. Their relationship gets worse when they move in with Nassian’s mother, Rashida, who disapproves of Khateja. When their mutual dislike becomes literally inflammatory—Khateja causes a fire—Nassain decides the couple should immigrate to South Africa, where an Indian community is establishing itself in Durban. As Coovadia meticulously details the squalls of the still-unconsummated married life, the story groans into a tired riff on Khateja’s recalcitrance and Nassain’s suffering that’s barely enlivened by copious descriptions of ethnic food. Things aren’t helped by a sluggish pace, anachronisms (a polyester handkerchief, a radio in the early 1900s, etc.), or the ending—meant to be tender and affirming but really just a perfunctory wrap-up—in which Khateja finally, and bathetically, capitulates.
A neat concept that goes inert in the execution.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-312-27219-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Picador
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2001
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.
Norwegian novelist Jacobsen folds a quietly powerful coming-of-age story into a rendition of daily life on one of Norway’s rural islands a hundred years ago in a novel that was shortlisted for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize.
Ingrid Barrøy, her father, Hans, mother, Maria, grandfather Martin, and slightly addled aunt Barbro are the owners and sole inhabitants of Barrøy Island, one of numerous small family-owned islands in an area of Norway barely touched by the outside world. The novel follows Ingrid from age 3 through a carefree early childhood of endless small chores, simple pleasures, and unquestioned familial love into her more ambivalent adolescence attending school off the island and becoming aware of the outside world, then finally into young womanhood when she must make difficult choices. Readers will share Ingrid’s adoration of her father, whose sense of responsibility conflicts with his romantic nature. He adores Maria, despite what he calls her “la-di-da” ways, and is devoted to Ingrid. Twice he finds work on the mainland for his sister, Barbro, but, afraid she’ll be unhappy, he brings her home both times. Rooted to the land where he farms and tied to the sea where he fishes, Hans struggles to maintain his family’s hardscrabble existence on an island where every repair is a struggle against the elements. But his efforts are Sisyphean. Life as a Barrøy on Barrøy remains precarious. Changes do occur in men’s and women’s roles, reflected in part by who gets a literal chair to sit on at meals, while world crises—a war, Sweden’s financial troubles—have unexpected impact. Yet the drama here occurs in small increments, season by season, following nature’s rhythm through deaths and births, moments of joy and deep sorrow. The translator’s decision to use roughly translated phrases in conversation—i.e., “Tha’s goen’ nohvar” for "You’re going nowhere")—slows the reading down at first but ends up drawing readers more deeply into the world of Barrøy and its prickly, intensely alive inhabitants.
A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-77196-319-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Biblioasis
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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