A sometimes-melodramatic but compelling survivor’s story.
A Pakistani woman lives much of her life in the Middle East, facing many obstacles in her search for love and financial security, in this novel.
Sawera is born in Pakistan in 1978, and is immediately given up for adoption by her biological mother to her sister, then childless. After Sawera’s adoptive parents have two sons, she becomes the family scapegoat, often being beaten by her mother (as when the girl comes home early and catches her parent kissing a man who’s not her husband). Sawera craves acceptance through romance and gains a bad reputation in high school. Jumping into marriage at age 17, she slaves for her husband, Wasim, and his three brothers and father; bears three children; and soon looks for another escape. Like her father before her, she seeks a work visa in Saudi Arabia; leaving her husband behind, she takes her children abroad. The money is good, but working in Saudi Arabia, and later in Bahrain, as an expatriate is a constant scramble for visa extensions and being at the mercy of exploitative sponsors, some extracting money and others sexual favors. Sawera must often leave her kids in Pakistan with relatives while she works, divorces, marries, divorces again, and tries to become a beautician. In the end, her life gets on the right track at last. Sawera both experiences and causes suffering (her children are often lonely and left with unaffectionate caretakers), but Gumber (Dying to Live, 2017, etc.) tells her story as a matter of triumphal survival in harsh circumstances. Something like Becky Sharp, Sawera is a survivor who, despite guilt pangs, sees moralizing as hypocrisy, especially in a world where the rich and well-connected get away so easily with cheating and using the powerless. On occasion, Sawera isn’t very subtle about pulling the heartstrings: Her mother “beat me up so much that I carried the bruises for weeks. My real bruises took an even longer time to heal. The bruises to my soul.” Overall, though, she’s convincing, and admirable in her determination to improve life for herself and her kids.
A sometimes-melodramatic but compelling survivor’s story.Pub Date: Oct. 30, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5462-6498-9
Page Count: 156
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: April 5, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The fine Israeli writer Yehoshua (Open Heart, 1996, etc.) makes a lengthy journey into the year 999, the end of the first millennium. Indeed, it is the idea of a great journey that is the heart of the story here. Ben Attar, a Moroccan Jewish merchant has come a long distance to France to seek out his nephew and former partner Abulafia. Ben Attar, the nephew, and a third partner, the Muslim Abu Lutfi, had once done a lucrative business importing spices and treasures from the Atlas Mountains to eager buyers in medieval Europe. But now their partnership has been threatened by a complex series of events, with Abulafia married to a pious Jewish widow who objects vehemently to Ben Attar’s two wives. Accompanied by a Spanish rabbi, whose cleverness is belied by his seeming ineffectualness; the rabbi’s young son, Abu Lutfi; the two wives; a timorous black slave boy, and a crew of Arab sailors, the merchant has come to Europe to fight for his former partnership. The battle takes place in two makeshift courtrooms in the isolated Jewish communities of the French countryside, in scenes depicted with extraordinary vividness. Yehoshua tells this complex, densely layered story of love, sexuality, betrayal and “the twilight days, [when] faiths [are] sharpened in the join between one millennium and the next” in a richly allusive, languorous prose, full of lengthy, packed sentences, with clauses tumbling one after another. De Lange’s translation is sensitively nuanced and elegant, catching the strangely hypnotic rhythms of Yehoshua’s style. As the story draws toward its tragic conclusion—but not the one you might expect—the effect is moving, subtle, at once both cerebral and emotional. One of Yehoshua’s most fully realized works: a masterpiece.
Pub Date: Jan. 19, 1999
ISBN: 0-385-48882-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1998
A presold prefab blockbuster, what with King's Carrie hitting the moviehouses, Salem's Lot being lensed, The Shining itself sold to Warner Bros. and tapped as a Literary Guild full selection, NAL paperback, etc. (enough activity to demand an afterlife to consummate it all).
The setting is The Overlook, a palatial resort on a Colorado mountain top, snowbound and closed down for the long, long winter. Jack Torrance, a booze-fighting English teacher with a history of violence, is hired as caretaker and, hoping to finish a five-act tragedy he's writing, brings his wife Wendy and small son Danny to the howling loneliness of the half-alive and mad palazzo. The Overlook has a gruesome past, scenes from which start popping into the present in various suites and the ballroom. At first only Danny, gifted with second sight (he's a "shiner"), can see them; then the whole family is being zapped by satanic forces. The reader needs no supersight to glimpse where the story's going as King's formula builds to a hotel reeling with horrors during Poesque New Year's Eve revelry and confetti outta nowhere....
Back-prickling indeed despite the reader's unwillingness at being mercilessly manipulated.
Pub Date: Jan. 28, 1976
ISBN: 0385121679
Page Count: 453
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1976
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