Quibbles, these, nonetheless. Chaudhuri has given us an immensely revealing and engagingly readable introduction to a...
Another fine collection, comparable to Vintage’s recent volumes of Scottish and Latin American fiction, and that rarest of contemporary publishing rarities: a real bargain.
The Anglo-Indian author of Real Time (p. 120) has assembled 38 examples of fiction and nonfiction prose ranging from the early-19th century through the contemporary period and representing Bengali, Hindi, Urdu, and English literatures. Several of its earlier entries demonstrate that (as Chaudhuri’s eloquent introduction and headnotes to individual selections attest) we in the West tend to know a little about trendy writers of the moment like Salman Rushdie and Arundhati Roy, and virtually nothing about such important forerunners as India’s only Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore (represented by his limpid short story “The Postmaster” and charming “Essay on Nursery Rhymes”); Sukumar Ray (author of the delightful animal fable “A Topsy Turvy Tale”); and Bibhuti Bhusan Banerjee (whose famous novel of childhood Pather Panchali inspired the “World of Apu” trilogy of Sukumar Ray’s son, celebrated filmmaker Satyajit Ray). The remarkable R.K. Narayan is represented by a pungent excerpt from his wry nostalgic novel The English Teacher, and Chaudhuri also offers self-contained chunks from Raja Rao’s important novel of exile, The Serpent and the Rope, and Nirad C. Chaudhuri’s seminal Autobiography of an Unknown Indian. Conversely, do we really need large dollops of Sunetra Gupta’s pedestrian Memories of Rain, Vikram Seth’s distinctively un-Indian verse narrative The Golden Gate, and the exceedingly well-known Midnight’s Children? One of Rushdie’s elegant short stories might better have been chosen, to set aside such gems as the pseudonymous Premchand’s Borgesian-Nabokovian classic “The Chess Players” (also filmed by Satyajit Ray), Nirmal Verma’s disturbing “Terminal,” and Naiger Masud’s Kafkaesque “Sheesha Ghat.” One further cavil: Why nothing from Rohinton Mistry, whose award-winning novels have virtually reinvented the Victorian family chronicle?
Quibbles, these, nonetheless. Chaudhuri has given us an immensely revealing and engagingly readable introduction to a literature whose evident riches will lure many readers to further exploration.Pub Date: June 18, 2002
ISBN: 0-375-71300-X
Page Count: 672
Publisher: Vintage
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
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
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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