A deeply informative tale of a nation’s history, told through the eyes of an uncommon woman.
An ambitious debut novel focuses on the sufferings and struggles of an Afghan woman and her family in a time of war.
The little village of Jabal os Siraj, deep in Afghanistan’s Panjshir Valley, has—like all of the country—been forced to rebuild itself again and again after repeated invasions across thousands of years of imperial wars. The history of this fictionalized valley and the nation that surrounds it is the subject of this story by author and women’s rights activist Rehman (Car Grease for the Camel: A Road Journey Across Afghanistan, 2006). Here we meet Gullali Haider, a bright-eyed and bighearted girl who falls in love, fights to marry the man of her choice, and learns the hard way that “nothing is more threatening to the Taliban than an educated woman.” Gullali grows up in a village where women “do not expose their legs for fear of gunfights” and where, “for men, a handgun or a rifle is a standard jewel.” After a misadventure involving a firearm ruins her wedding and her new husband’s orchard is bombed into ashes, Gullali hits the road to try to find her fortune in a region where blood flows freely in the streets. Throughout the course of her travels and traumas, the history of her homeland is recounted to the reader in some detail, sometimes by the author himself (in the form of chapterlong monologues about Afghanistan’s racial makeup, for example, or about the Russian invasion of 1979) and sometimes in the form of lectures by Gullali’s father, a former Kandahar professor and healthy skeptic of Islamic fundamentalism. By the time the last page is turned, readers should have a fine understanding of why it is impossible, as one character laments, “to pull this country out of antiquity.” Such history lessons, though excellent in themselves, tend to pull the reader away from the emotional center of the story and occupy space Rehman might have used to deepen readers’ understanding of his characters. But this is a small complaint. Otherwise, readers interested to know why America had (and continues to have) such trouble in this far-off place—and what the real people who live in the midst of all that turmoil are really like—would be well-advised to pick up a copy.
A deeply informative tale of a nation’s history, told through the eyes of an uncommon woman.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-9861599-0-9
Page Count: 262
Publisher: Ursa Major LLC
Review Posted Online: Feb. 25, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
A presold prefab blockbuster, what with King's Carrie hitting the moviehouses, Salem's Lot being lensed, The Shining itself sold to Warner Bros. and tapped as a Literary Guild full selection, NAL paperback, etc. (enough activity to demand an afterlife to consummate it all).
The setting is The Overlook, a palatial resort on a Colorado mountain top, snowbound and closed down for the long, long winter. Jack Torrance, a booze-fighting English teacher with a history of violence, is hired as caretaker and, hoping to finish a five-act tragedy he's writing, brings his wife Wendy and small son Danny to the howling loneliness of the half-alive and mad palazzo. The Overlook has a gruesome past, scenes from which start popping into the present in various suites and the ballroom. At first only Danny, gifted with second sight (he's a "shiner"), can see them; then the whole family is being zapped by satanic forces. The reader needs no supersight to glimpse where the story's going as King's formula builds to a hotel reeling with horrors during Poesque New Year's Eve revelry and confetti outta nowhere....
Back-prickling indeed despite the reader's unwillingness at being mercilessly manipulated.
Pub Date: Jan. 28, 1976
ISBN: 0385121679
Page Count: 453
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1976
PERSPECTIVES
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