An intimate portrait of the Indian community in Toronto from Vassanji (Uhuru Street, not reviewed). Nurdin Lalani is an East African of Indian descent who achieves an unimpressive but respectable equilibrium in Africa as a traveling shoe-salesman. But when African independence and nationalization movements of the 1970s make the situation in his hometown of Dar untenable, Nurdin immigrates to Canada with his wife, Zera, and their two young children, Fatima and Hanif. Life in Toronto is difficult for Nurdin. While Zera gets work immediately, and the children easily adapt to Canadian culture, Nurdin himself is jobless and rootless, both intrigued and intimidated by his unfamiliar surroundings. He's also placed in the awkward position of being supported by his wife and feels that he is not respected by his children. (Fatima tells her teachers that her father is a doctor, rather than an attendant, at the Ontario Addiction Centre, where he finally finds work.) Nurdin's solace and escape is in the strong Indian community that has somehow managed to replicate its East African lifestyle in Toronto, albeit modified. Gulshan Bai, for example, who had cooked for the residents of Dar over coal and wood fires with the help of numerous servants, continues to cook, but alone, in her apartment. Vassanji writes that ``it is not unusual to find coming down in an elevator a well-dressed young couple looking stiffly in front, holding...the local version of a bundle that a Gujarati peasant might carry: a plastic bag around several plastic containers.'' Best, here, are the author's descriptions of a transplanted people clinging to their past. The plot, loosely woven around Nurdin's being accused of molesting a woman, is secondary. Clear-eyed, sympathetic, and absorbing.
Pub Date: March 22, 1995
ISBN: 0-7710-8720-9
Page Count: 224
Publisher: McClelland & Stewart
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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