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THE GROOM TO HAVE BEEN

Name: THE GROOM TO HAVE BEEN
Author: Saher Alam
ISBN: 978-0-385-52460-5

by Saher Alam ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 1, 2008

A novel of considerable interest, steeped in Old-World traditions and New-World realities.

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Love—both thwarted and realized—is the main theme of this first novel set in the subculture of Indian Muslims.

Nasr seems to have it all—a successful career in New York City, an active social life and a doting family. According to his mother, however, he’s missing the major component of success—a fiancée—so she goes about rectifying this social inadequacy by arranging a marriage. While Nasr’s good friend Jameela cautions him that “ ‘[d]epth…can’t be assessed visually’” and that Indians are “ ‘susceptible to commodification…the valuation of people as property,’ ” Nasr reluctantly succumbs to his mother’s connubial enthusiasm. With ludicrously high—and sometimes overly critical—standards (candidates are too religious, not religious enough, too Old World, too New World, and so on), Nasr finds himself attracted, and eventually engaged, to the modest and self-effacing Farah, a woman in great contrast to the outspoken Jameela. The world of their engagement, like the larger social and political world, is then disrupted by the traumatic events of September 11. Knowing that Nasr works in New York, friends and family seek him out for his perspective on the destruction of the Twin Towers, though he explains he was in London at the time of the attack. Just at the point when Nasr consciously realizes his strong attraction to the spunky and iconoclastic Jameela, a relationship that’s been developing spontaneously over many years of family friendship, she discovers that her fiancé Javaid is brutally attacked merely for being a Muslim in a post-9/11 world. Javaid responds by deciding rather abruptly to move to Pakistan, which he envisions as a more welcoming environment, but this is obviously a move that would physically separate Nasr and Jameela and make the possibility of further romance difficult, perhaps impossible.

A novel of considerable interest, steeped in Old-World traditions and New-World realities.

Pub Date: July 1, 2008

ISBN: 978-0-385-52460-5

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Spiegel & Grau

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2008

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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Awards & Accolades

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21

Google Rating

New York Times Bestseller

THE HANDMAID'S TALE

by Margaret Atwood ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 17, 1985

Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.

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Awards & Accolades

Likes

21

Google Rating

New York Times Bestseller

The time is the not-so-distant future, when the US's spiraling social freedoms have finally called down a reaction, an Iranian-style repressive "monotheocracy" calling itself the Republic of Gilead—a Bible-thumping, racist, capital-punishing, and misogynistic rule that would do away with pleasure altogether were it not for one thing: that the Gileadan women, pure and true (as opposed to all the nonbelieving women, those who've ever been adulterous or married more than once), are found rarely fertile.

Thus are drafted a whole class of "handmaids," whose function is to bear the children of the elite, to be fecund or else (else being certain death, sent out to be toxic-waste removers on outlying islands). The narrative frame for Atwood's dystopian vision is the hopeless private testimony of one of these surrogate mothers, Offred ("of" plus the name of her male protector). Lying cradled by the body of the barren wife, being meanwhile serviced by the husband, Offred's "ceremony" must be successful—if she does not want to join the ranks of the other disappeared (which include her mother, her husband—dead—and small daughter, all taken away during the years of revolt). One Of her only human conduits is a gradually developing affair with her master's chauffeur—something that's balanced more than offset, though, by the master's hypocritically un-Puritan use of her as a kind of B-girl at private parties held by the ruling men in a spirit of nostalgia and lust. This latter relationship, edging into real need (the master's), is very effectively done; it highlights the handmaid's (read Everywoman's) eternal exploitation, profane or sacred ("We are two-legged wombs, that's all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices"). Atwood, to her credit, creates a chillingly specific, imaginable night-mare. The book is short on characterization—this is Atwood, never a warm writer, at her steeliest—and long on cynicism—it's got none of the human credibility of a work such as Walker Percy's Love In The Ruins. But the scariness is visceral, a world that's like a dangerous and even fatal grid, an electrified fence.

Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.

Pub Date: Feb. 17, 1985

ISBN: 038549081X

Page Count: -

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin

Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1985

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
BOOK OF LIVES
by Margaret Atwood

- BOOK REVIEW
FOURTEEN DAYS
edited by Margaret Atwood & Douglas Preston

- BOOK REVIEW
OLD BABES IN THE WOOD
by Margaret Atwood

- PERSPECTIVES
Appreciations: Margaret Atwood’s Novel The Handmaid’s Tale Turns 30

- SEEN & HEARD
Nan A. Talese, Legendary Publisher, Is Retiring

- BOOK TO SCREEN
Teasers Drop for ‘Shadow and Bone,’ Other Films

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ANIMAL FARM

A FAIRY STORY

by George Orwell ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 26, 1946

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A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.