Shree's experimental novel doesn’t always succeed—but even when it fails, it fails in a compelling way.
An 80-year-old woman begins a new life and, in the process, confronts her past.
Winner of the 2022 International Booker Prize, this ambitious novel is something of a behemoth, upending and redefining concepts of modernity, boundaries, gender, colonialism, and the India-Pakistan Partition. Along the way, Shree challenges the idea of what a novel—or even a story—can do. At the book’s center is 80-year-old Ma, who lives in Delhi with her son and daughter-in-law. Deeply depressed following her husband’s death, Ma refuses to get out of bed. Then, suddenly, Ma disappears for a few days, and when she turns up again, with no explanation for her absence, she goes to stay with her daughter. Beti, a writer and a divorcée, has spurned the more traditional life her brother pursued and prides herself on her freedom. But as Ma returns to life, Beti is forced to question just how modern and progressive she really is—after all, it’s Ma who’s developing an intimate friendship with a hijra and casting aside her traditional saris; Beti is more discomfited by these actions than she can admit even to herself. The complex relationships depicted here could have filled a dozen other novels, but they are not Shree’s focus. Instead, she tugs at the conventions of the novel itself: “Think of a story as a living being,” she writes. “There are countless beings and countless types of beings.” Some of this material becomes repetitive and could have benefited from a strict editor. Then, too, Shree is occasionally prone to a didacticism that isn’t quite as mind-blowing as she might have intended: “That which is perceived in a state of semiconsciousness is true unvarnished reality,” for example; “A rock is only a rock as long as it’s a rock.” Still, the language games and puns, nimbly translated by Rockwell, are delightful (“Their minds turned to curd: hue and cry occurred”), and Shree’s larger project is truly admirable: an utterly unique novel that redefines its own boundaries even as it unfolds.
Shree's experimental novel doesn’t always succeed—but even when it fails, it fails in a compelling way.Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2023
ISBN: 978-0-06-329940-5
Page Count: 624
Publisher: HarperVia
Review Posted Online: Nov. 15, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2022
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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