A striking debut, stronger on the micro than the macro.
The chain of events connecting a privileged young Indian woman, her volatile mother, and a tale-spinning Kashmiri merchant leads to tragedy in a story of religious conflict and domestic damage set in contemporary India.
Taking the classic form of a journey, Vijay’s vivid debut moves from sophisticated contemporary Bangalore to a harshly beautiful Himalayan mountain village as Shalini, a 30-year-old woman haunted by memories of her sarcastic, restless mother, recounts her painful accumulation of wisdom. As a child, Shalini’s home was periodically visited by Bashir Ahmed, a clothing merchant, one of a very few people attuned to Shalini’s mercurial mother. Although Bashir Ahmed could tell magical stories, his home life in Kashmir was becoming threatened by Hindu-Muslim tensions provoked by militant activism and the brutal response of the Indian army. Now, attempting to resolve her feelings about her mother’s death nine years earlier, Shalini feels Bashir Ahmed might hold the key and travels to remote Kashmir to find him. Her comfortable life is replaced with something more basic as she discovers small communities, kindly individuals, friendship, attraction, a possible new role for herself—and secrets. But Shalini is naïve, and her efforts to help others, and herself, ultimately prove catastrophic. Shuttling between past and present and exploring complicated themes of parental fealty, identity, and religious schism, Vijay’s ambitious novel is at its most magnetic when recounting Shalini’s immersion in a different world, her embrace by new kinds of family, and the lessons she learns. But its epic length sets up expectations of equally immersive political history, and here the storytelling is cloudier, staffed with clichéd characters. Most memorable are the scenes of stripped-down joy in the mountains where the author’s elegant, calm prose and intense evocations of people and places come into their own.
A striking debut, stronger on the micro than the macro.Pub Date: Jan. 15, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-8021-2840-9
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
PROFILES
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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