A deliberately over-the-top but sensitive take on multiple touchy subjects.
A celebrated professor who passes for Indian is revealed to be White. Is she a fraud or a trailblazer?
This provocative fiction debut and satire of identity politics by Sanyal, a German academic, centers on Saraswati, a Düsseldorf professor who’s infamous for her outspoken proclamations about race and social justice: She’s shut down Jordan Peterson in debate and kicked White students out of her courses. She’s a hero to Nivedita, a graduate student who’s been inspired by Saraswati to explore her own mixed-race background and launch a blog under the name Identitti. So she’s crushed when it’s revealed that Saraswati isn’t South Asian but a White woman named Sarah. Commentators quickly break out the hashtags (#SaraswatiShame) and liken her to Rachel Dolezal, the White college instructor who presented herself as Black. But Saraswati doesn’t retreat. She insists that race, much like gender, can be fluid and that her leaning into racial issues represents a noble rejection of Whiteness. “So it’s okay to transcend your gender, but a category as obviously made-up as race should be more fixed and inflexible than sex?” she asks Nivedita, and the narrative is thick with such questions. Sanyal mocks Saraswati’s privilege and sanctimony but takes her perspective seriously; the book refers often to writers on race, gender, and postcolonialism, from Frantz Fanon to bell hooks to Zadie Smith. Though the novel is effectively a long series of conversations in an apartment among Saraswati, Nivedita, and other interlocutors, it has a surprising liveliness thanks to Sanyal’s knack for sending up academia and social media pile-ons and her canny interweaving of Hindu mythology. (The goddess Kali provides an extended metaphor.) “What it means to be white must be allowed to change and expand,” Saraswati insists, and the novel is an eyebrow-raising prompt to debate the matter.
A deliberately over-the-top but sensitive take on multiple touchy subjects.Pub Date: July 26, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-662-60129-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Astra House
Review Posted Online: May 10, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2022
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
I Who Have Never Known Men ($22.00; May 1997; 224 pp.; 1-888363-43-6): In this futuristic fantasy (which is immediately reminiscent of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale), the nameless narrator passes from her adolescent captivity among women who are kept in underground cages following some unspecified global catastrophe, to a life as, apparently, the last woman on earth. The material is stretched thin, but Harpman's eye for detail and command of tone (effectively translated from the French original) give powerful credibility to her portrayal of a human tabula rasa gradually acquiring a fragmentary comprehension of the phenomena of life and loving, and a moving plangency to her muted cri de coeur (``I am the sterile offspring of a race about which I know nothing, not even whether it has become extinct'').
Pub Date: May 1, 1997
ISBN: 1-888363-43-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
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