Odd, elegant but incomplete portraits of a 20th-century icon and his needy disciple.
Woven together from fact and fiction, the story of Madeleine Slade, who became Mirabehn, one of Gandhi’s most devoted acolytes.
Kakar’s third novel (after Ecstasy, 2002) uses imagination to connect letters, diaries and reminiscences in establishing the intense relationship between Gandhi—who fought to liberate India from British colonial domination—and a privileged daughter of the English ruling class. Slade’s decision to join Gandhi’s ashram in 1925, when she was 33, was characteristic of a young woman driven by all-or-nothing attachments (a passion for Beethoven, an unrequited love). After a year’s preparation—sleeping on the floor, learning Urdu, spinning wool—she left for India and quickly became a close member of Gandhi’s inner circle. Their story is narrated by her Hindi teacher, Navin, who devotes less space to Gandhi’s politics and more to the idiosyncrasies of his lifestyle: his obsession with health and cleanliness; his moods; his experimental diet. Mira’s feelings for Gandhi are both reverential and possessive; she becomes frantic when separated from him. Their relationship follows a cyclical pattern: When her idolization becomes extreme, he withdraws or sends her away, then forgives her and writes letters expressing deep affection. Navin realizes he is not suited to Gandhi’s philosophy of celibacy and leaves the ashram. Later, as the political turmoil intensifies, Mira becomes infatuated with Prithvi Singh, who, despite Gandhi’s encouragement, fails to reciprocate her passion. The book ends in 1942, some years before independence, while Mira is last glimpsed in 1968 in an epilogue—now an old woman, retired to Austria, silent on the subject of Gandhi.
Odd, elegant but incomplete portraits of a 20th-century icon and his needy disciple.Pub Date: Jan. 15, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-59030-525-6
Page Count: 275
Publisher: Trumpeter/Shambhala
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.
Norwegian novelist Jacobsen folds a quietly powerful coming-of-age story into a rendition of daily life on one of Norway’s rural islands a hundred years ago in a novel that was shortlisted for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize.
Ingrid Barrøy, her father, Hans, mother, Maria, grandfather Martin, and slightly addled aunt Barbro are the owners and sole inhabitants of Barrøy Island, one of numerous small family-owned islands in an area of Norway barely touched by the outside world. The novel follows Ingrid from age 3 through a carefree early childhood of endless small chores, simple pleasures, and unquestioned familial love into her more ambivalent adolescence attending school off the island and becoming aware of the outside world, then finally into young womanhood when she must make difficult choices. Readers will share Ingrid’s adoration of her father, whose sense of responsibility conflicts with his romantic nature. He adores Maria, despite what he calls her “la-di-da” ways, and is devoted to Ingrid. Twice he finds work on the mainland for his sister, Barbro, but, afraid she’ll be unhappy, he brings her home both times. Rooted to the land where he farms and tied to the sea where he fishes, Hans struggles to maintain his family’s hardscrabble existence on an island where every repair is a struggle against the elements. But his efforts are Sisyphean. Life as a Barrøy on Barrøy remains precarious. Changes do occur in men’s and women’s roles, reflected in part by who gets a literal chair to sit on at meals, while world crises—a war, Sweden’s financial troubles—have unexpected impact. Yet the drama here occurs in small increments, season by season, following nature’s rhythm through deaths and births, moments of joy and deep sorrow. The translator’s decision to use roughly translated phrases in conversation—i.e., “Tha’s goen’ nohvar” for "You’re going nowhere")—slows the reading down at first but ends up drawing readers more deeply into the world of Barrøy and its prickly, intensely alive inhabitants.
A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-77196-319-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Biblioasis
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
Not for the faint of heart, perhaps, but an ambitious and thoroughly realized work of revisionist historical fiction.
Violent, often surrealistic Wild West yarn, Cormac McCarthy by way of Gabriel García Márquez.
Håkan Söderström is a force of nature, a wild giant whose name, in the frontier America in which he has landed, is rendered as the Hawk. On the docks back in Gothenburg he was separated from his brother, Linus, and he has sworn to find him in a land so big he can scarcely comprehend it. The Hawk lands in California and ventures eastward only to find himself in all kinds of odd company—crooks, con men, prophets, and the rare honest man—and a tide of history that keeps pushing him back to the west. Along the way, his exploits, literary scholar Diaz (Hispanic Institute/Columbia Univ.; Borges, Between History and Eternity, 2012) writes, are so numerous that he has become a legend in a frontier full of them; for one thing, says an awe-struck traveler, “He was offered his own territory by the Union, like a state, with his own laws and all. Just to keep him away.” The Hawk protests that most of what has been said about him is untrue—but not all of it. As Diaz, who delights in playful language, lists, and stream-of-consciousness prose, reconstructs his adventures, he evokes the multicultural nature of westward expansion, in which immigrants did the bulk of the hard labor and suffered the gravest dangers. One fine set piece is a version of the Mountain Meadows Massacre, in which religious fanatics dressed as Indians attack a pioneer party—save that in Diaz’s version, Håkan tears his way across the enemy force with a righteous fury befitting an avenging angel. “He knew he had killed and maimed several men,” Diaz writes, memorably, “but what remained most vividly in his mind was the feeling of sorrow and senselessness that came with each act: those worth defending were already dead, and each of his killings made his own struggle for self-preservation less justifiable.”
Not for the faint of heart, perhaps, but an ambitious and thoroughly realized work of revisionist historical fiction.Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-56689-488-3
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Coffee House
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
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