Tragedy befalls an Indian girl whose elders preordain her marital destiny in this absorbing drama, based on a true story.
When Meenakshi’s mother dies during childbirth, her father relinquishes the newborn to his sister and brother-in-law, Shamanna. Seeing Meena as a threat to his daughter’s potential suitors, Shamanna mistreats his fragile, obedient niece. It’s the early 1900s, and Indian tradition obliges young teenagers to enter into prearranged marriages. The homely yet moneyed Kamakshi is betrothed to her cousin Chandru, while the beautiful orphan Meena is bound to Ramu, a sickly, impotent 42-year-old man. A Romeo and Juliet–type scenario ensues when Meena and Chandru fall in love but are forbidden to wed. Resigned to uphold tradition, duty and honor to their families, they are reduced to occasional amorous glances while trapped in miserable marriages. Chandru turns to booze and prostitutes to blunt his longing for Meena. He abuses Kamakshi with the fury of an untamed beast. Meena begs him to restore his dignity as a husband and father, but he tells her it’s impossible, that without her, drink is his “life’s partner.” Chandru fathers five children, but Meena remains barren, a curse she believes God ordained for her. But when Kamakshi falls ill, Meena offers to take care of Chandru and their children. Weeks after returning home to her feeble husband, she discovers she is pregnant. No longer shamed by infertility, everyone rejoices and prays for a male offspring. But when Kamakshi and Ramu learn of their spouses’ betrayals, jealousy, fury and guilt lead to unforeseen consequences Herculean in nature. In tightly knitted prose, Rajanna explores ancient customs of Southern India that hold religion and superstition, familial rank and obedience in the highest regard. He expertly reflects India’s strict adherence to loyalty, the importance of the dowry and the significance of one’s position within the family. With the furor of a Greek tragedy, their lives unfold with dire consequences. A vivid chronicle of calamity that yanks at the heartstrings.
Pub Date: Oct. 19, 2010
ISBN: 978-1449047795
Page Count: 231
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: Jan. 10, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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