Like Joyce, Chaudhuri recognizes that the seemingly artless rhythms and repetitions of daily life can have, in thoughtful...
A meandering, sometimes mesmerizing quasi-novel about two Indian men living separately in London in 1985 and taking one of their regular walks together while memories arise and intrude.
Chaudhuri (Calcutta: Two Years in the City, 2013, etc.) returns to familiar themes of Indian émigrés, university life and music—most similar to those of the 1993 novel Afternoon Raag (published in the U.S. in the collection Freedom Song). Here, he deploys prose that has been described as Proustian in a plotless excursion with Joycean elements. It occupies one day yet has ramifications through several branches of a family tree across three generations. The title and some chapters refer to characters or elements from The Odyssey, while playful allusions to Ulysses dot the book. The first half of the narrative follows dyspeptic 22-year-old Ananda, a singer, so-so student at University College London and aspiring poet with a weakness for Philip Larkin. He ponders his noisy neighbors, tutors, sexual frustration and homesickness piqued by his formidable mother’s recent visit. He takes comfort in weekly constitutionals with his uncle, the dominant figure of the book’s second half. Radhesh is wealthy, though he retired one rung shy of his corporate goal, and is a lifetime short of losing his virginity. He lives in a modest flat and dispenses largess to relatives and a feckless neighbor. He played matchmaker as the brother of Ananda’s mother and the best friend of her husband-to-be. Radhesh and Ananda enjoy a prickly affection that stems from the nephew’s penury, their love of music, and the ties of heart and tongue to the homeland. Chaudhuri sprinkles Bengali words throughout the text—including Radhesh’s sad refrain, translated as “There’s a covering of moss on my heart.” The words’ strangeness may frustrate some readers, as may Chaudhuri’s ambling sense of story arc, but they add another kind of music to a work that captivates almost in spite of itself.
Like Joyce, Chaudhuri recognizes that the seemingly artless rhythms and repetitions of daily life can have, in thoughtful hands, the depth and breadth of true art.Pub Date: April 7, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-101-87451-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2015
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
A tour de force.
In 1974, a troubled Vietnam vet inherits a house from a fallen comrade and moves his family to Alaska.
After years as a prisoner of war, Ernt Allbright returned home to his wife, Cora, and daughter, Leni, a violent, difficult, restless man. The family moved so frequently that 13-year-old Leni went to five schools in four years. But when they move to Alaska, still very wild and sparsely populated, Ernt finds a landscape as raw as he is. As Leni soon realizes, “Everyone up here had two stories: the life before and the life now. If you wanted to pray to a weirdo god or live in a school bus or marry a goose, no one in Alaska was going to say crap to you.” There are many great things about this book—one of them is its constant stream of memorably formulated insights about Alaska. Another key example is delivered by Large Marge, a former prosecutor in Washington, D.C., who now runs the general store for the community of around 30 brave souls who live in Kaneq year-round. As she cautions the Allbrights, “Alaska herself can be Sleeping Beauty one minute and a bitch with a sawed-off shotgun the next. There’s a saying: Up here you can make one mistake. The second one will kill you.” Hannah’s (The Nightingale, 2015, etc.) follow-up to her series of blockbuster bestsellers will thrill her fans with its combination of Greek tragedy, Romeo and Juliet–like coming-of-age story, and domestic potboiler. She re-creates in magical detail the lives of Alaska's homesteaders in both of the state's seasons (they really only have two) and is just as specific and authentic in her depiction of the spiritual wounds of post-Vietnam America.
A tour de force.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-312-57723-0
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Oct. 30, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2017
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