A richly informative but didactic tale about the clash of old and new in India.
An Indian activist and an American architect team up to take on an emerging right-wing movement in this debut novel.
Sompur, India. It’s 2005, and 30-year-old Meena Kaul is the director of Behera House, a women’s shelter with a mission to combat the country’s rampant domestic abuse. Meena is spearheading the building of a newer, larger campus for the organization, though this has caused some tension in her household, as her husband, Keshav Narayan—India’s leading sustainable architect—was passed over in favor of a Western designer. That Westerner is the American Simon Bliss, who is searching for redemption following an accident at one of his previous buildings. Dissatisfied with his own marriage, Simon becomes enamored with the brilliant and beautiful Meena before he even meets her. When an economic downturn causes Meena to lose her funding, she receives a proposal from an unexpected source. The right-wing Hindu Democratic Party offers a grant, though Meena suspects it is only doing so in order to gain traction among female voters ahead of a 2006 election. “There’s no way in hell we’re taking their dirty loot,” protests one of Meena’s staffers, “at least not while I’m here. It’s an ultra-right-wing cabal. If elected, they’ll destroy whatever progress we’ve made on women’s rights over the last hundred years.” Even so, Meena considers taking the deal. But Simon can see that they may be making a devil’s bargain. As it becomes clear that Behera’s patron, Madhav Behera—as well as Kesh—is increasingly in the pocket of the HDP, Simon and Meena must work to keep the shelter free from its grip—even if to do so means making enemies with some very powerful people.
Langer’s prose is lucid and wonderfully detailed, particularly when it comesto the architecture: “Suddenly four magnificent stone towers loomed ahead. Each façade consisted of vertical ribs curving inward and culminating in a mushroom-like stone cap. Deep horizontal spaces cut across the ribs, giving the impression that the tower was made up of a thousand sheets of paper, each suspended by a thin layer of air.” The novel does an excellent job showing the dangers faced by women in certain traditional societies as well as the platform and political strategies of the HDP. But in purely narrative terms, the book is a bit underwhelming. The plot moves quite slowly—as one might expect of a story that focuses on the less-than-thrilling world of non-governmental organization grants—and the romance at the center of it feels rather forced. Meena, the obvious protagonist of the tale, takes a back seat to Simon (and, to an extent, Kesh), diluting the work’s feminist message. Indeed, the very presence of Simon as a co-protagonist is perhaps a fatal flaw in the story’s conception. Readers will certainly learn a lot from this volume—Langer is extremely successful at bringing the time and place to vivid life—but beyond that sense of transportation, this is not much joy to be found here.
A richly informative but didactic tale about the clash of old and new in India.Pub Date: Oct. 25, 2020
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 327
Publisher: Dryad Press
Review Posted Online: June 11, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An uncompromising message, delivered via a gripping story with two engaging heroines.
An undergraduate at Brown University unearths the buried history of a Latine artist.
As in her bestselling debut, Olga Dies Dreaming (2022), Gonzalez shrewdly anatomizes racial and class hierarchies. Her bifurcated novel begins at a posh art-world party in 1985 as the title character, a Cuban American land and body artist, garners recognition that threatens the ego of her older, more famous husband, white minimalist sculptor Jack Martin. The story then shifts to Raquel Toro, whose working-class, Puerto Rican background makes her feel out of place among the “Art History Girls” who easily chat with professors and vacation in Europe. Nonetheless, in the spring of 1998, Raquel wins a prestigious summer fellowship at the Rhode Island School of Design, and her faculty adviser is enthusiastic about her thesis on Jack Martin, even if she’s not. Soon she’s enjoying the attentions of Nick Fitzsimmons, a well-connected, upper-crust senior. As Raquel’s story progresses, Anita’s first-person narrative acquires a supernatural twist following the night she falls from the window of their apartment —“jumped? or, could it be, pushed?”—but it’s grimly realistic in its exploration of her toxic relationship with Jack. (A dedication, “In memory of Ana,” flags the notorious case of sculptor Carl Andre, tried and acquitted for the murder of his wife, artist Ana Mendieta.) Raquel’s affair with Nick mirrors that unequal dynamic when she adapts her schedule and appearance to his whims, neglecting her friends and her family in Brooklyn. Gonzalez, herself a Brown graduate, brilliantly captures the daily slights endured by someone perceived as Other, from microaggressions (Raquel’s adviser refers to her as “Mexican”) to brutally racist behavior by the Art History Girls. While a vividly rendered supporting cast urges Raquel to be true to herself and her roots, her research on Martin leads to Anita’s art and the realization that she belongs to a tradition that’s been erased from mainstream art history.
An uncompromising message, delivered via a gripping story with two engaging heroines.Pub Date: March 5, 2024
ISBN: 9781250786210
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.
The time is the not-so-distant future, when the US's spiraling social freedoms have finally called down a reaction, an Iranian-style repressive "monotheocracy" calling itself the Republic of Gilead—a Bible-thumping, racist, capital-punishing, and misogynistic rule that would do away with pleasure altogether were it not for one thing: that the Gileadan women, pure and true (as opposed to all the nonbelieving women, those who've ever been adulterous or married more than once), are found rarely fertile.
Thus are drafted a whole class of "handmaids," whose function is to bear the children of the elite, to be fecund or else (else being certain death, sent out to be toxic-waste removers on outlying islands). The narrative frame for Atwood's dystopian vision is the hopeless private testimony of one of these surrogate mothers, Offred ("of" plus the name of her male protector). Lying cradled by the body of the barren wife, being meanwhile serviced by the husband, Offred's "ceremony" must be successful—if she does not want to join the ranks of the other disappeared (which include her mother, her husband—dead—and small daughter, all taken away during the years of revolt). One Of her only human conduits is a gradually developing affair with her master's chauffeur—something that's balanced more than offset, though, by the master's hypocritically un-Puritan use of her as a kind of B-girl at private parties held by the ruling men in a spirit of nostalgia and lust. This latter relationship, edging into real need (the master's), is very effectively done; it highlights the handmaid's (read Everywoman's) eternal exploitation, profane or sacred ("We are two-legged wombs, that's all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices"). Atwood, to her credit, creates a chillingly specific, imaginable night-mare. The book is short on characterization—this is Atwood, never a warm writer, at her steeliest—and long on cynicism—it's got none of the human credibility of a work such as Walker Percy's Love In The Ruins. But the scariness is visceral, a world that's like a dangerous and even fatal grid, an electrified fence.
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 1985
ISBN: 038549081X
Page Count: -
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1985
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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