A simple story enriched by elegant narration and a light touch: Hariharan is a welcome newcomer to these shores.
The life of a middle-aged professor’s life begins to lurch off the road when a young student comes to live with him, in a tale told with wit and grace by Indian author Hariharan.
Shiv Murthy, like most academics, has to deal with campus politics every day, but usually it’s a question of getting the administration to approve the departmental budget or repair the photocopier. A historian specializing in medieval India, Shiv leads a quiet life in New Delhi, teaching courses at the university, attending department meetings, and writing articles and class outlines. His dealings with students tend to be formal and somewhat distant, so he was somewhat at a loss when asked if he would look after Meena, the daughter of a family friend, who had broken her leg and needed more help than her university roommates could provide. He agreed to take Meena into his home for a few weeks, despite the fact that his wife was away visiting their daughter in Seattle and he had his hands full at the university just then. Hindu fundamentalists had taken exception to an article Shiv wrote about Basavanna, a 12th-century poet and reformer (Shiv had questioned the veracity of some of the legends surrounding Basavanna, and he had dwelt too much on his objections to the caste system), and their protests had been taken up by the press. The university, fearful of the bad publicity, asked Shiv to issue a public apology. Never one to look for a fight, Shiv might well have complied—had Meena not been at hand. A feminist and radical, Meena encourages Shiv to stand his ground against the “reactionaries.” He does, surprising himself at the newfound intensity of his feelings on the subject—and for Meena. Can Shiv save his career? Can he save his marriage? Does he even want to? When the midlife crisis hits, all bets are off.
A simple story enriched by elegant narration and a light touch: Hariharan is a welcome newcomer to these shores.Pub Date: Aug. 19, 2003
ISBN: 0-375-42239-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
Absolutely enthralling. Read it.
A young Irish couple gets together, splits up, gets together, splits up—sorry, can't tell you how it ends!
Irish writer Rooney has made a trans-Atlantic splash since publishing her first novel, Conversations With Friends, in 2017. Her second has already won the Costa Novel Award, among other honors, since it was published in Ireland and Britain last year. In outline it's a simple story, but Rooney tells it with bravura intelligence, wit, and delicacy. Connell Waldron and Marianne Sheridan are classmates in the small Irish town of Carricklea, where his mother works for her family as a cleaner. It's 2011, after the financial crisis, which hovers around the edges of the book like a ghost. Connell is popular in school, good at soccer, and nice; Marianne is strange and friendless. They're the smartest kids in their class, and they forge an intimacy when Connell picks his mother up from Marianne's house. Soon they're having sex, but Connell doesn't want anyone to know and Marianne doesn't mind; either she really doesn't care, or it's all she thinks she deserves. Or both. Though one time when she's forced into a social situation with some of their classmates, she briefly fantasizes about what would happen if she revealed their connection: "How much terrifying and bewildering status would accrue to her in this one moment, how destabilising it would be, how destructive." When they both move to Dublin for Trinity College, their positions are swapped: Marianne now seems electric and in-demand while Connell feels adrift in this unfamiliar environment. Rooney's genius lies in her ability to track her characters' subtle shifts in power, both within themselves and in relation to each other, and the ways they do and don't know each other; they both feel most like themselves when they're together, but they still have disastrous failures of communication. "Sorry about last night," Marianne says to Connell in February 2012. Then Rooney elaborates: "She tries to pronounce this in a way that communicates several things: apology, painful embarrassment, some additional pained embarrassment that serves to ironise and dilute the painful kind, a sense that she knows she will be forgiven or is already, a desire not to 'make a big deal.' " Then: "Forget about it, he says." Rooney precisely articulates everything that's going on below the surface; there's humor and insight here as well as the pleasure of getting to know two prickly, complicated people as they try to figure out who they are and who they want to become.
Absolutely enthralling. Read it.Pub Date: April 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-984-82217-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
"This soil," concludes the young narrator of this quiet chronicle of garrotted innocence, "is bad for all kinds of flowers. Certain seeds it will not nurture, certain fruit it will not bear." And among the exclusions of white rural Ohio, echoed by black respectability, is ugly, black, loveless, twelve-year-old Pecola. But in a world where blue-eyed gifts are clucked over and admired, and the Pecolas are simply not seen, there is always the possibility of the dream and wish—for blue eyes. Born of a mother who adjusted her life to the clarity and serenity of white households and "acquired virtues that were easy to maintain" and a father, Cholly, stunted by early rejections and humiliations, Pecola just might have been loved—for in raping his daughter Cholly did at least touch her. But "Love is never better than the lover," and with the death of her baby, the child herself, accepting absolutely the gift of blue eyes from a faith healer (whose perverse interest in little girls does not preclude understanding), inches over into madness. A skillful understated tribute to the fall of a sparrow for whose small tragedy there was no watching eye.
Pub Date: Oct. 29, 1970
ISBN: 0375411550
Page Count: -
Publisher: Holt Rinehart & Winston
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1970
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