A flat novel with an interesting structure.
Jbara (Kahraman, 2009, etc.) tells the story of a female photographer in India searching for fulfillment in this fragmentary novel.
Shamyana’s father abandoned the family when she was young, and her relationship with her mother has always been distant. In high school, she discovers photography when her best friend, Shyam, shows her his new camera. Shyam makes his secret feelings for Shamyana known, and the two marry after graduation. Despite his conservative family, Shyam encourages Shamyana to pursue photography, which she sees as a way to access her confusing inner life. “My dream is to let the people see the world through my lens,” she says, to which he replies, “I have faith that you will succeed one day.” The young photographer eventually finds the marriage too constraining for her ambitions, and Shyam agrees to an amicable split. On a trip to Goa, she meets a hotel owner named Rohan with whom she senses immediate chemistry. A new friend sets her up with corporate shoots and magazine features, and her career burgeons. She gets mixed signals from Rohan, however, and when another man expresses interest in her, she marries him. But is it what she wants? Her nervous breakdown suggests otherwise. Jbara tells Shamyana’s story in a series of microchapters, many only a paragraph long. While some depict scenes or dialogue that advance the plot, others are lyrical snippets of the protagonist’s thoughts; from the chapter “Ignite Fire”: “This route is too confining for me to slither. I feel my senses ignite fire. That is seething in my soul. I was unable to be me. I repositioned myself. I felt my body incite fire. That is raging in my body. I can’t be me. I can’t be them.” Despite these windows of interiority, many characters and events feel stilted or flat, and Shamyana’s story elicits surprisingly little emotional investment from the reader. While the novel’s structure is ambitious and original, it’s not used effectively. Shamyana’s true self should be more accessible, and yet by the end of the novel, she still feels like a stranger.
A flat novel with an interesting structure.Pub Date: May 22, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4505-3186-3
Page Count: 167
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: Dec. 28, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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