A beautifully rendered but flawed exploration of how caste still prevails painfully in modern India.
A British-born novelist who grew up in New Delhi but also spent much of his adult life in New York seeks a closer connection to his native land through explorations into the Brahmin scholarly caste, the “twice-born.”
Taseer (The Way Things Were, 2014, etc.) began tentative forays back to India to learn Sanskrit in the ancient spiritual center of Benares, “the key to secret India,” as his mother told him. “In Benares,” he writes, “it was possible to see in miniature every major event that had etched itself onto India’s consciousness.” The author sought teachers to help him make a more intimate intellectual connection to India. In 2014, he spent many months in the Ganges-skirted city to interview Brahmins, who are by birthright the intellectuals, scientists, astrologers, and scholars of the society; during adolescence, they are “initiated by rite into [their] ancient vocation of the mind.” Taseer felt that penetrating the intellectual secrets of this “twice-born” caste would somehow dispel for him the feeling of always being an outsider—the sense, as Jawaharlal Nehru has written, of feeling a “queer mixture of the East and the West, out of place everywhere, at home nowhere.” In presenting his first-person stories of the Brahmins, the author also examines tales of Hindu nationalists; a scholar trying to synthesize the traditional vs. ancient currents; a revolutionary upstart; a spiritual feminist; and a family man who ultimately cannot wash the dish of the visitor who belongs to a lesser caste because it will contaminate his house and village. Unfortunately, despite Taseer’s earnest attempts to force a declaration of truth from his Brahmin interviewees, he is evasive about his own ethnicity and identity—namely, his Muslim family and his gay sexual orientation—often stranding readers with him in emotional limbo.
A beautifully rendered but flawed exploration of how caste still prevails painfully in modern India.Pub Date: March 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-374-27960-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Nov. 20, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2018
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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