The author’s fondness for his material keeps this convoluted romantic epic afloat.
A richly atmospheric debut, first installment in a projected three-volume saga, portrays the clash of Portuguese, Hindu and Muslim cultures in the waning years of India’s Mogul empire.
A reigning Portuguese family in Goa finds itself facing bankruptcy after the 1657 Dutch victory in the Pepper Wars. For protection, patriarch Carlos Dasana is forced to woo the widowed sultana of neighboring Bijapur, a Muslim country. Since the sultan’s heir is only nine and the sultana is capricious, it’s almost as important to woo Bijapur’s grand vizier, Wali Khan, who’s likely to become regent. Via caravan, Carlos sends the vizier an irresistible bribe: former Hindu temple dancer Maya, now a famous prostitute. The motley cast of characters accompanying the caravan includes Carlos’s brash, profligate nephew Geraldo; dull and honest middleman Da Gama; Pathan, a self-important Muslim captain from the Bijapur court; and Carlos’s niece Lucinda, who wants to see the world. The action tracks the caravan along its perilous journey from Goa to Bijapur; inside the howdah, atop the elephant, ride Lucinda, Maya and her escort, the plump, unctuous eunuch Slipper, who becomes an abusive master. While battling bandits, near-rapes and elephant breakdowns, the young women grow friendly. Maya reveals that she reluctantly left her temple, where she was a “vessel” for the priests, when her guru was swept away in floods and she was sold to raise money. She possesses a headdress of great value, coveted by the brotherhood of eunuchs led by Whisper, who is also vying for the regency of Bijapur. While making an extended stay in Belgaum, the idyllic palace of the sultan’s former concubine, Lucinda falls in love with Pathan, while Maya and Geraldo lustily go at it. In this cauldron of competing favors and a constantly shifting balance of powers, portents hint at altogether different fates for Lucinda and Maya.
The author’s fondness for his material keeps this convoluted romantic epic afloat.Pub Date: Aug. 31, 2006
ISBN: 0-312-32548-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2006
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
The writing is merely serviceable, and one can’t help but wish the author had found a way to present her material as...
An unlikely love story set amid the horrors of a Nazi death camp.
Based on real people and events, this debut novel follows Lale Sokolov, a young Slovakian Jew sent to Auschwitz in 1942. There, he assumes the heinous task of tattooing incoming Jewish prisoners with the dehumanizing numbers their SS captors use to identify them. When the Tätowierer, as he is called, meets fellow prisoner Gita Furman, 17, he is immediately smitten. Eventually, the attraction becomes mutual. Lale proves himself an operator, at once cagey and courageous: As the Tätowierer, he is granted special privileges and manages to smuggle food to starving prisoners. Through female prisoners who catalog the belongings confiscated from fellow inmates, Lale gains access to jewels, which he trades to a pair of local villagers for chocolate, medicine, and other items. Meanwhile, despite overwhelming odds, Lale and Gita are able to meet privately from time to time and become lovers. In 1944, just ahead of the arrival of Russian troops, Lale and Gita separately leave the concentration camp and experience harrowingly close calls. Suffice it to say they both survive. To her credit, the author doesn’t flinch from describing the depravity of the SS in Auschwitz and the unimaginable suffering of their victims—no gauzy evasions here, as in Boy in the Striped Pajamas. She also manages to raise, if not really explore, some trickier issues—the guilt of those Jews, like the tattooist, who survived by doing the Nazis’ bidding, in a sense betraying their fellow Jews; and the complicity of those non-Jews, like the Slovaks in Lale’s hometown, who failed to come to the aid of their beleaguered countrymen.
The writing is merely serviceable, and one can’t help but wish the author had found a way to present her material as nonfiction. Still, this is a powerful, gut-wrenching tale that is hard to shake off.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-279715-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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