Hindi movies are the metaphor for all that ails the subcontinent in this satirical tale from Tharoor (The Great Indian Novel, 1991), all about life in India's own Tinseltown— ``Bollywood,'' Bombay. Cutting and splicing monologues, lengthy synopses of movies, and excerpts from ``Bollywood's'' sharp-clawed Show Biz columnist, the Cheetah, Tharoor relates the rise, fall, and apotheosis of handsome Ashok Banjara—eldest son of a prominent politician, a connection that helps him get his first role. Ashok's rise to megastardom in the Hindi movie industry—which churns out films with simplistic plots and plaintive theme songs to please the rural masses—is swift. The quintessential movie star, Ashok lives as if life were a movie starring him, along with a supporting cast of beautiful women and servile men. He marries a costar but cheats on her; becomes a Member of Parliament—just another starring role, he assumes—but is framed in a tax-evasion scheme and must resign; in disgrace, he accepts the lead in a low-budget movie, then in a terrible accident on the set is mortally injured. Apotheosis is assured as throngs of loyal fans keep vigil outside while he lies dying. As entertaining and diverting as this sashay through glitzy ``Bollywood'' is, characters like Ashok's father and brother, and a fellow actor who always played the villain, offer more serious commentary. For them, the politicians and films are the same: ``We are both involved in pretense, [and] politics is an end in itself, just like the Hindi film,'' the father says to his dying son. Corruption and illusion are rife; politicians behave like movie villains; and shallow movie stars are heroes of the people. Nothing is real. Tharoor is one of those rare writers who felicitously combines gentle satire with an urgent concern for society's ills. Another eloquent—and entertaining—commentary on contemporary India.
Pub Date: June 26, 1992
ISBN: 1-55970-181-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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
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