A story of enough provocative, sensual grace to have fueled Scheherazade for a 1,002nd night.
Finding universals in the particulars of a father’s short dalliance with a married woman, framed within the context of late-colonial India.
At the beginning of this 11th and concluding volume in his Continents of Exile series (All for Love, 2001, etc.), the India-born, blind author Mehta recounts an incident that occurred when he was a young man living in New York. The neighborhood cobbler addresses him as “Mr. Mehta” and tells him how much he liked his recent book. Mehta’s appalled reaction (“How dare he be so familiar with me?”) suggests the burden laid on him by his sense of propriety. And propriety will be sorely tested when his father suggests that Mehta help him with a novel he’s writing, the story of an idealistic young doctor working in the hill country who falls in love with a shepherd girl and rails against the abuse she suffers at the hands of the local Nawat: The tale’s verisimilitude ignites in Mehta a suspicion that this may be creative nonfiction, but he can only approach the subject gingerly: “In the balance were my lifelong glowing notions of his rectitude and the purity and stability of his forty-nine-year-long marriage to my mother.” Mehta cultivates the ground of his father’s affair with great sensitivity, painting the peerless backdrop of the Simla hill station and explaining the norms at play. (“Nothing was more important than to keep the reputation of the family pure and unbesmirched.”) His mother handled the situation “with good humor and good cheer,” observing of the lover, who was also her close friend: “She came like a butterfly and went away like a butterfly.” At the heart of the story are the pair’s love letters, each of which Mehta displays to best advantage in all their fragility, expressing wonder at their survival in a world of rapid transformation.
A story of enough provocative, sensual grace to have fueled Scheherazade for a 1,002nd night.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2004
ISBN: 1-56025-628-1
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Nation Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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