As intelligent as it is gripping.
An Iranian Jew waits wrongly accused in prison while his family slowly crumbles in Tehran and New York.
In the wake of the Iranian Revolution, as the Ayatollah Khomeini’s Republic is first being established, gem dealer Isaac Amin is arrested near his opulent Tehran home. Technically accused of being an Israeli spy, Isaac’s real crimes are his religion and his personal wealth. As his interrogators try to break him with physical abuse and neglect, Isaac is most tortured by the memories of his family, with whom he is allowed no contact. On the homefront, the situation is similarly bleak. Isaac’s beloved wife Farnaz tirelessly seeks information about her husband, and in doing so, begins to question the loyalty of the family’s trusted maid, Habibeh, whose son (a former employee of Isaac’s) has become an ardent member of the Republic. Isaac and Farnaz’s precocious young daughter, Shirin, decides to take matters into her own hands, risking the family’s lives when she steals confidential files from a classmate’s home in the hopes of saving her uncle from the same fate as her father. And, an ocean away, son Parviz feels the strains in different ways, when both information and money from his family suddenly stops. He takes a room and job with a welcoming Hassidic man in Brooklyn, and, against his better judgment, falls in love with the daughter, Rachel. Eventually, Isaac triumphs over his accusers by bribing his way out of prison with a gift of his life savings. But the family’s troubles are hardly over, and as they try to make their way out of the country to reunite their family overseas, young Shirin’s well-intentioned plan threatens to curtail all their efforts. Sofer’s characters are immensely sympathetic and illustrate plainly and without pretense the global issues of class, religion and politics following the Iranian Revolution.
As intelligent as it is gripping.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-06-113040-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
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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