by Jag Bakshi ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 27, 2014
A witty, titillating tale of a modern-day Candide’s self-discovery.
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In Bakshi’s debut novel, a naïve young man from India makes a life-changing voyage to America.
The author gives E.M. Forster’s classic A Passage to India (1924) a winking, ironic twist in this tale about a young Indian man losing his innocence during a passenger ship voyage in the 1950s. Baxi Ram Babu is a psychology major in his mid-20s in the small Indian village of Gunju Nagar, where the men suffer from a very specific mental plague—the burden of sexually pleasing their wives is driving them to suicide. It inspires young Baxi to take an impromptu sea voyage to the United States to find a state-of-the-art cure. His wife and father are stunned by his sudden decision to travel halfway around the world, and both predict terrible outcomes. But Baxi is adamant, and he soon finds himself on his way to the States—and promptly surrounded by morally dubious characters intent on introducing him to hard liquor, cigars, marijuana and “women’s lib.” He meets strong-willed and sharp-tongued women on board who provide him with sexual experiences he’s never had with his devoted wife back home. They also introduce him to heresy, as one woman calls temples mere “collection houses”—an idea that at first horrifies Baxi but that he then begins to believe. Bakshi neatly works a great deal of irony and insight into this comparatively short novel, and it’s a frequently uproarious, sexual coming-of-age tale. Readers will simultaneously deplore Baxi’s weak will and chuckle at his spectacularly comprehensive loss of innocence. There are quite a few well-turned comic moments, including one adept set piece involving a misunderstanding, two scandalized firemen and a fire extinguisher. Some of the humor can be obvious at times, and many characters have only enough depth to be comic foils, but the satire remains winning just the same.
A witty, titillating tale of a modern-day Candide’s self-discovery.Pub Date: March 27, 2014
ISBN: 978-1493770625
Page Count: 176
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Sept. 8, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Hanya Yanagihara ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 2015
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
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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
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by J.D. Salinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1951
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
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