This time Mehran adds too much sugar to the recipe.
Mehran’s second novel (Pomegranate Soup, 2005) returns to Ballinacroagh, County Mayo, circa 1987, and the thriving Babylon Café where food is sustenance for the soul.
The Aminpour sisters from Iran are happily running their café, where oldest sister Marjan cooks according to Zoroastrian tenets that connect ingredients closely to spiritual as well as physical health. Marjan has carried the responsibility for her younger sisters’ care since their flight from revolution-torn Iran a decade earlier. One sister, Bahar, who keeps the café sparkling clean, is a sensitive girl whose brief marriage to a brutal Muslim fundamentalist left her emotionally scarred. Layla, meanwhile, is a schoolgirl obsessed with Much Ado About Nothing and in love with her boyfriend, university student Malachy. Beloved by most of the villagers, the sisters are not without certain enemies—among them the sour widow Dervla Quigley, who spies on the café from her window across the street. This sequel to Pomegranate Soup finds each sister now facing her own secret challenge. Bahar has been meeting with Father Mahoney about converting to Catholicism. Layla is considering consummating her relationship with Malachy, much to Marjan’s consternation, and Marjan, whose first love affair ended tragically in Iran, finds herself attracted to a new suitor, Julian Muir, a novelist and student of Rumi who has returned to Ballinacroagh to renovate his family estate. Meanwhile Estelle Delmonico, the elderly Italian immigrant who sold her late husband’s bakery to the Aminpours, which they then turned into the café, has retired to her country cottage. Out walking one morning, she finds a half-drowned girl who has attempted an abortion, illegal in Ireland. Estelle embroils herself and Marjan in the risky adventure of saving the girl and finding her family before the authorities crack down. Humanistic goodwill, tinged with spirituality, overcomes fundamentalist rigidity, while the closing pages—not counting the inevitable recipes—hint at another installment to come.
This time Mehran adds too much sugar to the recipe.Pub Date: May 20, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-8129-7249-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2008
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
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
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