A finely conceived, absorbing and powerful book.
A complex parable of unification and division, based on the myth of the god Shiva and his consort Parvati, is subtly constructed in this ambitious successor to Suri’s fine first novel, The Death of Vishnu (2001).
Suri tells the story of a woman’s life in modern India after independence from Great Britain. She is Meera Sawhney, who grows up in a well-to-do family dominated by her imperious father (who owns a prosperous publishing company), and finds her liberation in marriage to handsome, self-indulgent pop singer Dev Arora. But Meera’s freedom is no more stable than that of her country, which she, and we, experience in the wake of partition from Pakistan, through food riots and continuing outbreaks of Hindu vs. Muslim violence, the embattled careers of Mohandas Gandhi and Prime Minister Indira Gandhi (who becomes India’s political leader, following the path trod by her father Jawaharlal Nehru)—into the early 1980s, with the shadow of ongoing conflict and anarchy expanding. Meera’s identification with India is predictable, but the novel gains impressive force from its searching characterizations: of ever hopeful, continually underachieving Dev; his brother Arya, an intolerant Hindu extremist whose hatred of Muslims is no less inflammatory than are his sexual attentions to Meera; her demanding father (“Paji”), neither as loving nor as much a liberal intellectual as he pretends and yearns to be; and the sisterhood of friends and family who share Meera’s struggles, bond with her and complicate her marriage and motherhood. But the story’s core is Meera’s smothering, heated, virtually erotic love for her only child, Ashvin, the beloved son whose name evokes those of the deities Shiva and Vishnu, and whose need for her embraces provokes Meera to envision a “parallel universe.” In it, rather than be bound by protective constraints of family relationship, they will be free to “be one.” Like India’s dream of unity, this cannot be, and Meera pays the price for her overreaching.
A finely conceived, absorbing and powerful book.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-393-06569-5
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2007
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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