A finely wrought family drama.
Tragedy and powerful but fraying limitations on women roil an Indian family in this intense historical coming-of-age novel.
In 1957, the expectations for Indian women are pretty cut-and-dried: be a good housewife. Unfortunately, in the family of Achan Krishnan, a tax collector recently reassigned to the chilly Himalayan province of Assam as a punishment for not taking bribes, such certitudes no longer satisfy. His beautiful wife, Devi, longs for more erotic passion than the stolid Achan can muster; her longings inflamed by racy romance novels, she casts her gaze at a handsome British plantation manager who dances with her at parties while Achan fumes. As if to overcompensate for her improprieties, Devi strictly polices her two daughters: Anu, a dutiful teenager, and Kavita, an unruly, 9-year-old scamp. The family tensions ratchet up when Kavita’s little brother, Arun, the apple of his parents’ eye simply because he’s a son, gets eaten by a tiger during an outing to a park. The grief-stricken Devi shaves her head and goes silent, then rebounds into even more scandalous conduct with the Brit. As the girls head into adulthood and feel the liberating tremors of the 1960s, she imposes a straightjacketing virginity-protection regime on them—no contact with boys allowed—while plotting arranged marriages to dreary older men. But a violent rupture looms as Anu conceives a forbidden love with a boy not of her caste. Warriar’s (The Enemy Within, 2005, etc.) novel, told mainly through Kavita’s voice, steeps readers in Indian culture, reveling in vivid descriptions of foods, landscapes, colorful fashions, and convoluted mores. It’s also a subtle, gripping study of patriarchy as it blights women’s lives while poisoning their relationships with one another. Kavita grows up in a world that prizes her virginity yet subjects her to constant molestation attempts by men. Meanwhile, Devi—suffocating in a loveless marriage and a generally unfulfilled life and acting out in brazen ways—is determined to impose the same hell on her daughters; indeed, she comes to see them as the main stumbling blocks to her happiness. But although Devi’s an almost monstrous character, the author still manages to portray her sympathetically. Warriar’s richly textured novel portrays this unraveling family with real emotional depth, showing how social pressures turn parents and children against one another.
A finely wrought family drama.Pub Date: June 25, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-9877484-1-6
Page Count: 292
Publisher: Warriar Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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