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
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
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
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