Honestly earned echoes of A Passage to India, in an ambitious, gorgeously written near-miss.
The lives of two restless women separated both by a century and from all they love most are explored in replete parallel narratives—in this Booker-nominated third novel from the Egyptian-born British author (In the Eye of the Sun, 1993, etc.).
In 1901, Englishwoman Anna Winterbourne, living in British-occupied Cairo, is left alone when her husband in essence dies of depression and despair over his country’s arrogant cruelty toward this newest jewel in its crown. Determined to penetrate to the heart of Egypt’s patient, seductive mysteries, Anna ends up a captive in the home of prominent attorney and political figure Sharif Pasha al-Baroudi, who will become her second husband. The story of their arduous effort to blend in their own union the best of their two warring cultures is uncovered in the late 1990s by Anna’s great-granddaughter Isabel Parkman, a journalist who’s researching Egyptian concepts of, and attitudes toward, the approaching millennium. Isabel’s life imitates Anna’s to the extent that she too is in love with a native Egyptian: volatile symphony conductor, writer, and political activist Omar, who has fathered her child—perhaps with the aid of a talisman: a piece of a tapestry woven by Anna, depicting the fertility myth of Isis and Osiris. Much of this complex and exotic material is as engrossing as it is instructive, though Isabel’s gradual understanding of the world through which her ancestor hopefully moved (and by which she was eventually, brutally bereft and rejected) is too often conveyed in virtual lectures offered by Isabel’s researcher and mentor Amal—who is, in another parallelism that seems altogether too forced, the great-granddaughter of Anna’s companion and soulmate, her Egyptian sister-in-law Layla. Conversely, the Anna Winterbourne plot is often stunningly dramatic: Soueif makes us believe in this passionate exile’s deep identification with her embattled host country and genuine love for the man who embodies it for her.
Honestly earned echoes of A Passage to India, in an ambitious, gorgeously written near-miss.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2000
ISBN: 0-385-72011-4
Page Count: 529
Publisher: Anchor
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2000
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
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BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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