An intimate portrait of Iran, stuffed with ambition, but ultimately overladen.
Abdolah, an Iranian expatriate now living in the Netherlands, nests a story about a father and son into a sweeping novel that chronicles the tumultuous modern history of his homeland.
Aga Akbar was born an outsider twice over: He’s the illegitimate son of a nobleman as well as a deaf-mute. With the assistance of Kazem Khan, his colorful, opium-addicted uncle, he learns to communicate in his own form of sign language, find work as a carpet mender and start a family in a mountain town near the Soviet border. And though he never formally learned to read and write, he diligently filled a notebook using a cuneiform-like script inspired by a 3,000-year-old message written by the first king of Persia in a nearby cave. That notebook is the springboard for the plot here: Aga Akbar’s son, Ishmael, is a political dissident living in the Netherlands who’s struggling to decipher his father’s writing. In the process, Ishmael provides brief vignettes about Iran’s history, from the military dictatorship of Reza Khan that began the 1920s through the war with Iraq that consumed the country for most of the 1980s. Aga Akbar is buffeted by these changes despite his modest station: He’s jailed and beaten by officers during Reza Khan’s rein under suspicion of writing codes, and he endangers his life as Ishmael becomes more involved in the country’s leftist movement. Abdolah’s prose, translated from the Dutch, is clean and lyrical, but the novel ultimately feels unbalanced: The elegantly formed passages about Aga Akbar’s struggles and courtships in the first half give way to the second half, focused on Ishmael’s life, where politics is emphasized at the expense of storytelling. And because the key player in the climax of the book—Ishmael’s sister, Golden Bell—is so incompletely rendered, the book closes on a disappointingly unaffecting note.
An intimate portrait of Iran, stuffed with ambition, but ultimately overladen.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-059871-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
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
Genetically engineered dinosaurs run amok in Crichton's new, vastly entertaining science thriller. From the introduction alone—a classically Crichton-clear discussion of the implications of biotechnological research—it's evident that the Harvard M.D. has bounced back from the science-fantasy silliness of Sphere (1987) for another taut reworking of the Frankenstein theme, as in The Andromeda Strain and The Terminal Man. Here, Dr. Frankenstein is aging billionaire John Hammond, whose monster is a manmade ecosystem based on a Costa Rican island. Designed as the world's ultimate theme park, the ecosystem boasts climate and flora of the Jurassic Age and—most spectacularly—15 varieties of dinosaurs, created by elaborate genetic engineering that Crichton explains in fascinating detail, rich with dino-lore and complete with graphics. Into the park, for a safety check before its opening, comes the novel's band of characters—who, though well drawn, double as symbolic types in this unsubtle morality play. Among them are hero Alan Grant, noble paleontologist; Hammond, venal and obsessed; amoral dino-designer Henry Wu; Hammond's two innocent grandchildren; and mathematician Ian Malcolm, who in long diatribes serves as Crichton's mouthpiece to lament the folly of science. Upon arrival, the visitors tour the park; meanwhile, an industrial spy steals some dino embryos by shutting down the island's power—and its security grid, allowing the beasts to run loose. The bulk of the remaining narrative consists of dinos—ferocious T. Rex's, voracious velociraptors, venom-spitting dilophosaurs—stalking, ripping, and eating the cast in fast, furious, and suspenseful set-pieces as the ecosystem spins apart. And can Grant prevent the dinos from escaping to the mainland to create unchecked havoc? Though intrusive, the moralizing rarely slows this tornado-paced tale, a slick package of info-thrills that's Crichton's most clever since Congo (1980)—and easily the most exciting dinosaur novel ever written. A sure-fire best-seller.
Pub Date: Nov. 7, 1990
ISBN: 0394588169
Page Count: 424
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1990
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