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OF MANGOES AND MONSOONS

Name: OF MANGOES AND MONSOONS
Author: Suresh Kanekar
ISBN: 978-1441554420

by Suresh Kanekar ‧ RELEASE DATE: N/A

A fascinating appendix to the struggle for Indian independence

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Awards & Accolades

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Kanekar’s debut is both a historical novel of midcentury India and a portrait of the philosopher as a young man.

India freed itself from English colonial rule and became a nation on Aug. 15, 1947. But well into the next decade, pockets of the subcontinent remained under French and Portuguese control. One of these pockets was Goa, a small enclave on the country’s western coast that, during the ’50s, fought covert and overt battles against Portugal in the hopes of throwing off foreign rule. Enter Ramesh Natekar, a young intellectual coming of age during the Goan struggle for independence. He is a student, a thinker and a teacher who studies philosophy and teaches English and history. A thoughtful young man, he reads Marx, Freud, Plato and Spinoza in an effort to mold his mind. But he is also a budding revolutionary who believes that Goa has struggled for too long under Western domination and deserves to take its rightful place as part of the new India. Though Ramesh, like Gandhi, is devoted to nonviolent resistance, he is arrested for his involvement with freedom protesters and jailed. The novel follows Ramesh’s principled fight for Goan self-determination. But into this tale of political intrigue, the author weaves stories from Ramesh’s youth and adolescence, and the novel is as much about personal growth as it is about political intrigue. Steamy cutaways to Ramesh’s romantic intrigues—including one with an upper-caste woman who is his true love—spice up the narrative. As Kanekar adds detail and depth to his protagonist’s portrait, Ramesh’s own development becomes a metaphor for the maturation of Goa, and Ramesh’s labors and triumphs mirror those of his homeland. Kanekar writes with a sure hand, artfully blending historical analysis, personal narrative and philosophical digression into a satisfying whole.

A fascinating appendix to the struggle for Indian independence

Pub Date: N/A

ISBN: 978-1441554420

Page Count: -

Publisher: Xlibris

Review Posted Online: July 23, 2010

Review Program: Kirkus Indie

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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HOUSE OF LEAVES

by Mark Z. Danielewski ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 6, 2000

The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...

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An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.

Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad. The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized). As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses). Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture. Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."

The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year.

Pub Date: March 6, 2000

ISBN: 0-375-70376-4

Page Count: 704

Publisher: Pantheon

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

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The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.