Parekh writes prose that sometimes is self-consciously portentous, but, still, he has created an intelligent and moving take...
A promising first novel about the Indian immigration experience deftly avoids the predictable overemphasis on food and culture, and explores instead the universal theme of failed dreams.
Moving between the past and present, the narrator, Rajiv Kothari, like all good storytellers, takes his time to tell how he came to steal the Ambassador—a popular Indian car, not a diplomat. Prompted by the sudden death of his father Vasant from a heart attack, he begins with the past as he tries to understand his father, whose life in America had never matched his extravagant expectations. The narrative is also an exploration of Rajiv’s own feeling about the tensions between his Indian heritage and his American experience. Rajiv recalls how his grandfather Bapuji, a fervent Nationalist in the 1930s, when India was still under British rule, bombed a local bridge; while Bapuji escaped, his wife was briefly imprisoned as an accessory. Their son Vasant came to the US in the mid-’60s as a graduate student in engineering. He stayed on, returning only to marry an Indian woman, with whom he raised a family in suburban New York. As the years passed, Vasant made a good living, but, as Rajiv recalls, the cumulative wounds of alienation and prejudice took their toll: neighbors objected to the presence of visiting family members; and the parents of Rajiv’s girlfriend Anne were embarrassed by Vasant’s behavior. Taking a semester off, Rajiv goes to India, where he finds his grandparents living in reduced circumstances, while Bapuji is still an activist, even though his dream of an India free of foreign influence is tarnished by reality. After Rajiv is inveigled into helping Bapuji plan another bombing, he begins to understand how misleading snap judgments can be: “people fracture into possibility.”
Parekh writes prose that sometimes is self-consciously portentous, but, still, he has created an intelligent and moving take on a timely subject.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-7432-1429-3
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2001
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.
A retelling of ancient Greek lore gives exhilarating voice to a witch.
“Monsters are a boon for gods. Imagine all the prayers.” So says Circe, a sly, petulant, and finally commanding voice that narrates the entirety of Miller’s dazzling second novel. The writer returns to Homer, the wellspring that led her to an Orange Prize for The Song of Achilles (2012). This time, she dips into The Odyssey for the legend of Circe, a nymph who turns Odysseus’ crew of men into pigs. The novel, with its distinctive feminist tang, starts with the sentence: “When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist.” Readers will relish following the puzzle of this unpromising daughter of the sun god Helios and his wife, Perse, who had negligible use for their child. It takes banishment to the island Aeaea for Circe to sense her calling as a sorceress: “I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, I thought, too dull to fly even when the door stands open. I stepped into those woods and my life began.” This lonely, scorned figure learns herbs and potions, surrounds herself with lions, and, in a heart-stopping chapter, outwits the monster Scylla to propel Daedalus and his boat to safety. She makes lovers of Hermes and then two mortal men. She midwifes the birth of the Minotaur on Crete and performs her own C-section. And as she grows in power, she muses that “not even Odysseus could talk his way past [her] witchcraft. He had talked his way past the witch instead.” Circe’s fascination with mortals becomes the book’s marrow and delivers its thrilling ending. All the while, the supernatural sits intriguingly alongside “the tonic of ordinary things.” A few passages coil toward melodrama, and one inelegant line after a rape seems jarringly modern, but the spell holds fast. Expect Miller’s readership to mushroom like one of Circe’s spells.
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-55634-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
PROFILES
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.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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