Readers acquainted with Indian history and culture will likely find this story intriguing, but others may find themselves...
In the northeastern Indian state of Assam, a young girl grows up to become a successful politician despite the qualms of her traditional family in Kumar’s debut novel.
This family saga traces the life of Mohuva Sharma, the daughter of an Assamese Brahmin priest, and her extended family between the 1960s and the present. Mohuva was born with an inauspicious horoscope, a major barrier to marriage in traditional Hindu culture, and slowly comes to realize that her only avenue to a fulfilling life is through education. In school, she becomes a student leader during a period of great unrest in the 1970s, but at home, she’s still constrained by her parents’ expectation that she be a good, conservative girl and confine herself to traditional female roles. When she finally returns to school to become a teacher, she meets Noyon, an engineer whom she eventually marries. They have a son, Neelav, but after just five years of marriage, Noyon dies of cancer. Mohuva’s drive for social justice leads her to run for political office, and she ultimately becomes a representative in the Parliament of India. Mohuva’s story is entwined with the lives and loves of her numerous sisters and cousins; some run away to marry for love, others languish in abusive or unfulfilling arranged marriages, some fall afoul of local politics, others succeed. In the background, traditional Assamese culture slowly, but not entirely, succumbs to the onslaught of modern India; roles open to women expand but not too far; religion and superstition loosen their grips but remain central to everyday life; and everyone goes to the movies. The political turmoil of India’s northeastern states, marooned in a sea of Muslim and communist nations, is ever-present, and its repercussions touch everyone’s lives. Kumar provides some background and explanation for what’s going on in the culture, but what she chooses to expand upon is fairly hit or miss. An expedition to see the 1975 low-budget blockbuster film Jai Santoshi Ma, for instance, revolves entirely around how the family bought tickets and arranged transportation but tells nothing about how family members reacted to the film’s story of divine intervention in an oppressed woman’s life—despite the fact that the transformation of women’s roles is a theme that dominates Kumar’s narrative.
Readers acquainted with Indian history and culture will likely find this story intriguing, but others may find themselves lost.Pub Date: April 18, 2012
ISBN: 978-8129119667
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Rupa Publications
Review Posted Online: Nov. 6, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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