This debut novel follows four Indian college friends who, despite their disappointing lives, reconnect in modern India while trying to find purpose and direction.
Sometimes, the more things change, the more they stay the same. That’s the underlying theme of Swamy’s first novel, which follows four Indian friends whose lives since college have led to heartbreak. Karan, the main character, has the ability to see people in colors. After graduation, he went to the United States, where he lost the daughter of whom he was not the biological father. Arjun became a mental health professional whose wife was killed by Indian extremists. Aarti fell in love with her father-figure professor who could never love her back. Nymphomaniac Indu became an alcoholic magazine editor. All four return to Bangalore, India, the scene of their happy college days, to take pleasure in each other’s company once again as they attempt to figure out where to go from here. They also set out to find their fifth friend, Danny; what they discover about Danny helps them rediscover themselves. Swamy has written a quiet yet purposeful novel whose philosophy is spelled out by a quote from Voltaire in the epigraph: “Faith consists in believing when it is beyond the power of reason to believe.” Despite how many times they get knocked down, the friends get back up, still determined to find the happiness they believe life holds. The friends are vividly portrayed, although Karan, the main character, is probably the weakest, and the narrative slows when he bemoans his lot in life. Unhappy Indu and her desperate search for validation make the biggest impression. India itself is like a character—a country struggling to modernize and adjust to the presence of Google and Hewlett-Packard. The characters, like the country, are trying to find themselves in the modern world while honoring the traditional dictates of their forefathers—a difficult balancing act for any generation.
A quietly dynamic novel about the power of love, faith and friendship.
Pub Date: July 16, 2013
ISBN: 978-9382473633
Page Count: 325
Publisher: Frog Books
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2014
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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