Umrigar’s debut unfolds raga-like, the histories of its people forming sustained riffs that spring from and return to the...
A first novel trains an unflinching eye on Indians at home and abroad. Set in contemporary Bombay, Umrigar’s story is both a valentine to the past and a lament for the present of its title city.
The residents of Wadia Baug, a middle-class apartment building inhabited by Parsis, gather for a wedding. The journeys to and from the wedding form short narrative bookends for the wedding itself, the principal present action. The narrator, however, is more interested in past than present, and so the paragraphs devoted to the wedding are often just weak excuses to explore bygone times. The result is a thin present with little drama, but a rich past with detailed accounts, sometimes amusing, sometimes lyrical, sometimes sad, of the characters’ individual histories and their eventual intersectings, the whole sometimes reading like summaries. Dosa Popat, an embittered widow and Wadia Baug’s resident gossip, observes the guests’ departures for the wedding and reflects on their stories while lamenting her own unrealized life—a promising academic career cut off before its beginning by a drunken promise of marriage made by her father. Jimmy Kanga, father of the groom, oversees the reception while considering the huge trajectory of his life from orphaned adolescence to law degree at Oxford, return to Bombay and life in the fast lane as a high-profile attorney, then a rejection of the high life for a return to his simpler, safer, and more satisfying Wadia Baug roots. Rusi and Coomi Bilimoria bitterly and sadly recall the failure of their marriage, ultimately achieving a tentative reconciliation on the bus ride home. At the close, all these individuals recede into the fabric of the city.
Umrigar’s debut unfolds raga-like, the histories of its people forming sustained riffs that spring from and return to the same source. The minimal plotting is at times contrived and sentimental, but the portrait of the city and its citizens is authoritative, richly textured, and engaging.Pub Date: July 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-312-27716-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Picador
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2001
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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