An ambitious and mostly successful work about an adolescent’s challenges to tradition.
Lothe’s debut historical novel offers the story of an Indian boy coming-of-age in the early 20th century.
According to the family astrologer, Shyam Shirodkar will eventually experience two nearly deadly accidents—before meeting his end in a third: “The question was not if but when the event would happen. Folks were so sure that they did not even call the doctor when Shyam fell ill.” As the story opens, his mother is dead, his father has remarried, and one of the three predicted accidents has already come to pass. Shyam is largely ignored by his extended family except for his kind, older cousin, Veemal. This general coldness leads Shyam to eventually leave home to receive an education at a Christian missionary college in Nagpur, and he begins to question the old ways of his former culture. In a country where Hindus, like the Shirodkars, are increasingly in conflict with Muslim neighbors, Western culture seems to offer a potential alternative for Shyam—until a massive war in Europe erupts and touches the lives of many Indian people. As Shyam grows and changes, so does his country around him, and neither of their fates are certain. Lothe writes in a highly detailed prose style that effectively captures the rigid traditions of life in Shyam’s Berar Province: “They quenched their thirst with another cup of hot tea since drinking water at the bus stand would guarantee a serious case of dysentery….After a couple incidents involving blown tires and interminable delays, the vehicle reached Amravati at dusk.” Overall, this is a slow-moving epic of family, philosophy, and cultural upheaval—a kind of novel that’s not often seen nowadays. Although the pace occasionally drags, Lothe manages to balance its many elements in a manner that makes the story feel at once personal and societal. Using Christianity as a way to explore the practices of Hinduism, for example, makes for a clever entrance into traditional Indian culture for insiders and outsiders alike.
An ambitious and mostly successful work about an adolescent’s challenges to tradition.Pub Date: Feb. 23, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4808-7345-2
Page Count: 482
Publisher: Archway Publishing
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Too beholden to sentimentality and cliché, this novel fails to establish a uniquely realized perspective.
Hunter’s debut novel tracks the experiences of her family members during the Holocaust.
Sol and Nechuma Kurc, wealthy, cultured Jews in Radom, Poland, are successful shop owners; they and their grown children live a comfortable lifestyle. But that lifestyle is no protection against the onslaught of the Holocaust, which eventually scatters the members of the Kurc family among several continents. Genek, the oldest son, is exiled with his wife to a Siberian gulag. Halina, youngest of all the children, works to protect her family alongside her resistance-fighter husband. Addy, middle child, a composer and engineer before the war breaks out, leaves Europe on one of the last passenger ships, ending up thousands of miles away. Then, too, there are Mila and Felicia, Jakob and Bella, each with their own share of struggles—pain endured, horrors witnessed. Hunter conducted extensive research after learning that her grandfather (Addy in the book) survived the Holocaust. The research shows: her novel is thorough and precise in its details. It’s less precise in its language, however, which frequently relies on cliché. “You’ll get only one shot at this,” Halina thinks, enacting a plan to save her husband. “Don’t botch it.” Later, Genek, confronting a routine bit of paperwork, must decide whether or not to hide his Jewishness. “That form is a deal breaker,” he tells himself. “It’s life and death.” And: “They are low, it seems, on good fortune. And something tells him they’ll need it.” Worse than these stale phrases, though, are the moments when Hunter’s writing is entirely inadequate for the subject matter at hand. Genek, describing the gulag, calls the nearest town “a total shitscape.” This is a low point for Hunter’s writing; elsewhere in the novel, it’s stronger. Still, the characters remain flat and unknowable, while the novel itself is predictable. At this point, more than half a century’s worth of fiction and film has been inspired by the Holocaust—a weighty and imposing tradition. Hunter, it seems, hasn’t been able to break free from her dependence on it.
Too beholden to sentimentality and cliché, this novel fails to establish a uniquely realized perspective.Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-399-56308-9
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Nov. 21, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2016
BOOK TO SCREEN
The writing is merely serviceable, and one can’t help but wish the author had found a way to present her material as...
An unlikely love story set amid the horrors of a Nazi death camp.
Based on real people and events, this debut novel follows Lale Sokolov, a young Slovakian Jew sent to Auschwitz in 1942. There, he assumes the heinous task of tattooing incoming Jewish prisoners with the dehumanizing numbers their SS captors use to identify them. When the Tätowierer, as he is called, meets fellow prisoner Gita Furman, 17, he is immediately smitten. Eventually, the attraction becomes mutual. Lale proves himself an operator, at once cagey and courageous: As the Tätowierer, he is granted special privileges and manages to smuggle food to starving prisoners. Through female prisoners who catalog the belongings confiscated from fellow inmates, Lale gains access to jewels, which he trades to a pair of local villagers for chocolate, medicine, and other items. Meanwhile, despite overwhelming odds, Lale and Gita are able to meet privately from time to time and become lovers. In 1944, just ahead of the arrival of Russian troops, Lale and Gita separately leave the concentration camp and experience harrowingly close calls. Suffice it to say they both survive. To her credit, the author doesn’t flinch from describing the depravity of the SS in Auschwitz and the unimaginable suffering of their victims—no gauzy evasions here, as in Boy in the Striped Pajamas. She also manages to raise, if not really explore, some trickier issues—the guilt of those Jews, like the tattooist, who survived by doing the Nazis’ bidding, in a sense betraying their fellow Jews; and the complicity of those non-Jews, like the Slovaks in Lale’s hometown, who failed to come to the aid of their beleaguered countrymen.
The writing is merely serviceable, and one can’t help but wish the author had found a way to present her material as nonfiction. Still, this is a powerful, gut-wrenching tale that is hard to shake off.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-279715-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2018
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