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
A luminous novel about the deep value of telling stories.
Two strangers are unknowingly connected by a rare manuscript.
Maxwell Moreau, born to a pirate father and a Dominican immigrant mother in New Orleans in 1920, has a childhood in which he is surrounded by his parents’ stories. His mother, Adana Moreau, learns to read in English with Maxwell at her side. She writes a well-received science fiction novel, Lost City, but becomes gravely ill before finishing the sequel, A Model Earth; she and Maxwell burn the manuscript before she dies . The pirate travels north in search of work, and Maxwell is effectively an orphan when his father fails to meet him as planned in Chicago. Nearly 80 years later, a man named Saul is grieving the death of his grandfather, his only family after his parents were killed in a terrorist attack in Israel. Shortly before dying, his grandfather had asked Saul to mail a package for him to someone named Maxwell Moreau at a university in Chile. When the package is returned some time later, Saul takes on the task of finding Maxwell, now a well-known physicist who theorizes about parallel universes, to give him the papers inside—the same manuscript Adana Moreau had burned so many years earlier—and fulfill his grandfather’s last request. This search takes Saul and his friend Javier to New Orleans just after Hurricane Katrina, and the two reflect on their friendship and Saul’s grandfather’s work as a historian as Javier documents the extensive loss of life in an effort to bear witness. Zapata’s debut novel is a wonderful merging of adventure with thoughtful but urgent meditations on time, history, and surviving tragedy. The characters are richly drawn, and the prose is striking: “They drove east, back the way they had come, and the road seemed to take on an extra-temporal quality, like they were traveling backward in time. We’re already meeting ourselves coming the other way, he thought as the Cadillac sped on and on and on.”
A luminous novel about the deep value of telling stories.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-335-01012-4
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Hanover Square Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 10, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2019
There are more than enough quotable lines to fill a couple of reviews.
Berg’s debut is set in an age when telephones were novel.
If you want to make a phone call in 1952, you’ll lift the receiver and hear an operator say “Number, please.” And if you live in Wooster, Ohio, that operator might well be Vivian Dalton. She’ll listen in on your conversation even though she knows she shouldn’t, always hoping to hear “something scandalous.” Her Pawpy had advised “Just don’t get caught,” but her dead granny’s advice (ignored) was better: “Be careful what you wish for.” Vivian wishes for gossip about rich Betty Miller, whose “life was always perfectly in place,” but Betty has a delicious secret about Edward Dalton that’s sure to ruin Vivian’s life. Vivian never finished high school and frets that her bright teenage daughter, Charlotte, will exceed her in life. The narrative is sprinkled with dictionary definitions of fancy words Vivian doesn’t know, like “privy” and “myriad.” She thinks the school has assigned pornography to Charlotte when she sees The Myth of Sisyphus and thinks it’s about syphilis. Meanwhile, Betty is ever so full of herself because her father owns a bank and the ladies of Wooster always accept her written invitations. She briefly considers calling her Christmas party “Savior’s Celebratory Soirée.” Then she hosts a special afternoon tea to reveal the news about Vivian’s husband to a group of ladies “well versed in the art of displaying false concern.” Berg’s storytelling is warm, sympathetic, and witty—Vivian's "fear had eaten her common sense like it was a casserole,” and her “rage had melted and cooled a little into a hardened shell of shame and humiliation.” Vivian hires a private investigator to look into her husband’s past and consequently deletes chocolate from all her recipes. (Well, it makes sense to her.)
There are more than enough quotable lines to fill a couple of reviews.Pub Date: March 10, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-297894-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 25, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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