Anything but a conventional novel, its pleasures arise from a craftsman’s writing and its subtle demands and rewards.
In this elusive, evocative fiction, a novelist’s visit to his boyhood hometown of Bombay calls up memories of a longtime friend and a recent terrorist episode.
Returning to “the city of my growing up,” the narrator learns that Ramu, an old schooldays friend he counted on seeing and regards as “what survives of the familiar” in Bombay, is in rehab. So he carries on with the main business of his visit, which is a reading from his latest novel. The narrator, who bears the author’s name, concedes that “my writing is accused of coming directly from life.” Later he’ll say he is working on a book called Friend of My Youth that he’s “pretty sure” is a novel. Novelists used to be coy about what was autobiographical in their fiction, and now what looks like autobiography is called autofiction. Chaudhuri's (Odysseus Abroad, 2015, etc.) seventh novel doesn't submit to one label, offering instead a medley of genres, from journal to travelogue to essay and memoir but little in the way of straightforward fiction. The narrator navigates streets and sites and the memories they kindle, many of which concern Ramu, a longtime heroin user. The writer gives an interview, visits a bookstore. The story is awash in mundane details, but the narrator is always sifting through them for resonance as he also sifts through different pasts. So he runs an errand for his wife and mother at an upscale shoe shop in the Taj Mahal Hotel, one of the targets of the terrorist attacks on the sea-swept city in 2008, when “men with AK-47s alighted from dinghies.” The narrator ponders the work of repairing the raids’ damage, connects it to Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus and a passage from Walter Benjamin on the painting that flows smoothly back into terrorism and the Taj. The gray matter’s colorful play recalls Virginia Woolf’s disingenuous disclaimer early in A Room of One’s Own: “I give you my thoughts as they came to me.”
Anything but a conventional novel, its pleasures arise from a craftsman’s writing and its subtle demands and rewards.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-68137-338-6
Page Count: 176
Publisher: New York Review Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.
Atwood goes back to Gilead.
The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), consistently regarded as a masterpiece of 20th-century literature, has gained new attention in recent years with the success of the Hulu series as well as fresh appreciation from readers who feel like this story has new relevance in America’s current political climate. Atwood herself has spoken about how news headlines have made her dystopian fiction seem eerily plausible, and it’s not difficult to imagine her wanting to revisit Gilead as the TV show has sped past where her narrative ended. Like the novel that preceded it, this sequel is presented as found documents—first-person accounts of life inside a misogynistic theocracy from three informants. There is Agnes Jemima, a girl who rejects the marriage her family arranges for her but still has faith in God and Gilead. There’s Daisy, who learns on her 16th birthday that her whole life has been a lie. And there's Aunt Lydia, the woman responsible for turning women into Handmaids. This approach gives readers insight into different aspects of life inside and outside Gilead, but it also leads to a book that sometimes feels overstuffed. The Handmaid’s Tale combined exquisite lyricism with a powerful sense of urgency, as if a thoughtful, perceptive woman was racing against time to give witness to her experience. That narrator hinted at more than she said; Atwood seemed to trust readers to fill in the gaps. This dynamic created an atmosphere of intimacy. However curious we might be about Gilead and the resistance operating outside that country, what we learn here is that what Atwood left unsaid in the first novel generated more horror and outrage than explicit detail can. And the more we get to know Agnes, Daisy, and Aunt Lydia, the less convincing they become. It’s hard, of course, to compete with a beloved classic, so maybe the best way to read this new book is to forget about The Handmaid’s Tale and enjoy it as an artful feminist thriller.
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54378-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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