Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy, Hari Kunzru, et al. need to make room on the podium. Booker judges should pay attention too.
A lively debut gives vivid magical-realist form to the necessity of loving others—and the sorrows to which doing so exposes us.
Anglo-Indian author Shanghvi’s warm, witty omniscient narrative voice gets the story off to a dazzling start, as transcendently beautiful Anuradha Patwardhan travels (at a time in the early 1920s) to Bombay for her arranged marriage to impossibly handsome young physician Vardhamaan Gandharva. The couple’s blissful, too-perfect union is blighted by the enmity of Vardhamaan’s ferocious stepmother Divi-bai (accompanied everywhere by her verbally malevolent parrot), and by the accidental early death of their son Mohan (“a child of mythic good looks”)—a misfortune that seems to confirm the sentiments of the melancholy “song of dusk” the Patwardhan women are fated to croon. Shanghvi then shifts to the capsule history of Dariya Mahal, a Bombay seaside mansion whose owner had literally died from loving too much. It’s there that Vardhamaan brings Anuradha following their brief separation after Mohan’s death. Enter Nandini Hariharan, Anuradha’s teenaged distant cousin: a seductively gorgeous self-taught painter whose inherent animality (rumor speaks of her lineal descent from “a woman [who] had mated with a leopard”) makes her sexually irresistible and preternaturally self-assured, and propels her rapid ascent to the highest levels of Bombay’s artistic and social worlds. Meanwhile, Anuradha has borne her second son Shloka, a physically perfect child whose slowness to learn speech ironically foreshadows Vardhamaan’s unexplained withdrawal from her. And Shloka’s growth—into language, loving, and eventual independence—both validates the legacy of Dariya Mahal (itself a virtual character in the novel) and parallels Nandini’s embattled liberation from her own nature. The logic of the narrative and the gorgeous atmospheric and verbal trappings make this wonderful novel as insistently readable as it is – particularly in its moving final pages – immensely satisfying.
Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy, Hari Kunzru, et al. need to make room on the podium. Booker judges should pay attention too.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2004
ISBN: 1-55970-734-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
In a literary thriller of the highest order, Schweblin teases out the underlying anxieties of being vulnerable and loving...
A taut, exquisite page-turner vibrating with existential distress and cumulative dread.
Schweblin’s English-language debut, translated by the eminently capable McDowell, plays out as a tense, sustained dialogue in an emergency clinic somewhere in the Argentinian countryside between a dying woman named Amanda and her dispassionate interlocutor, David, who, we quickly ascertain, is a child but seems to be neither her child nor any clear relation to her. At David’s ever more insistent prompting, Amanda recounts a series of events from the apparently recent past, but as he pushes her to recall whatever trauma has landed her in her terminal state, a struggle for narrative control ensues. Though Amanda gradually gains the power to tell her story in her own way—despite David’s frequent protestations that she's dwelling on irrelevant details that won’t help her understand her circumstances—the impotence and inchoate dangers that underscore the conversation in the clinic ricochet throughout the larger story being told, of what brought her there and why David is with her. Even with the small freedom to tell the deathbed tale she wants to tell, she moves inexorably in the retelling toward the moment when death became inevitable, just as time, in the clinic, creeps closer to the realization of that death. While the book resides in the realm of the uncanny, its concerns are all too real. Once the top blows off Schweblin’s chest of horrors, into which we’d been peeking through a masterfully manipulated crack, what remains is an unsettling and significant dissection of maternal love and fear, of the devastation we’ve left to the future, and of our inability to escape or control the unseen and unimagined threats all around us.
In a literary thriller of the highest order, Schweblin teases out the underlying anxieties of being vulnerable and loving vulnerable creatures and of being an inhabitant of a planet with an increasingly uncertain future.Pub Date: Jan. 10, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-399-18459-8
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: Oct. 4, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2016
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
This gifted author has packed enough material for at least two books into her debut.
A toddler’s death and a vast wildfire bracket a coming-of-age story set at a horse ranch in Topanga Canyon in the summer of 1993.
Rory Ramos is 15 the year her alcoholic stepfather, Gus, is responsible for the car accident that kills Charlie Price. Charlie is the 19-month-old son of a movie star and his wife, the only sibling of their beautiful, troubled teenage daughter, Vivian. Rory has enjoyed spying on this family from her bedroom window, which perches above their spread in the canyon, but the night of the accident she was busy getting bitched out by her shrewish barmaid mother. Rory and Gus are both employed at Leaning Rock Ranch, locus of much of the action and a slew of other characters, including wealthy teenage twins June and Wade Fisk. June is out as a lesbian, and her attentions to Rory will help the latter realize she’s in love with Vivian. While Vivian is dating the racist, classist pig Wade, she is also happy to toy with Rory as well as her former AP English teacher. In addition to being an accomplished horsewoman, Rory is a promising photographer—“I can’t teach this” says her photo teacher in admiration—and in fact she will grow up to become a war correspondent, as we learn in a second narrative line set in 2015, narrated by her daughter. If this sounds complicated, it is, and this is not the half of it. Milliken writes well about horses, photography, Southern California, taxidermy, lifestyles of the rich and famous, and more—if only she had chosen a subset of these topics.
This gifted author has packed enough material for at least two books into her debut.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5011-8858-9
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
