Aasmaani herself is this strong novel’s greatest strength. She’s a remarkable narrator, in a thoroughly captivating tale.
In a Karachi-set fourth novel, Shamsie (Kartography, 2003, etc.) explores universal themes.
At age 30, Aasmaani Inqalab finds herself taking a job at a Pakistani TV station, where she meets Shehnaz Saeed, famed actress who is returning to the spotlight after years of retirement. Shehnaz also happened to be an old, close friend of Aasmaani’s mother. Aasmaani’s family tree is complicated. Her parents were married for less than a year, her activist mother was in love with a famous Pakistani poet, and Aasmaani was raised by four parents—mum, dad, stepmother and the Poet. But then the Poet died, and Aasmaani’s mother disappeared. And now, 14 years later, Shehnaz waltzes into Aasmaani’s life, bearing strange letters in some sort of code. She has received these letters from a nameless fan, and, remembering that Aasmaani’s mother and the Poet corresponded in code, she passes the notes to Aasmaani. Could these mysterious messages contain clues that would explain Aasmaani’s mother’s disappearance, or the Poet’s death? Aasmaani, who remembers the code from childhood, translates the letters and becomes convinced that the supposedly dead Poet is writing them. Thus the heart-pumping plotline. Has the Poet really been held captive these many years? And what happened to Aasmaani’s mother? But intrigue isn’t the only trick Shamsie has up her sleeve. This is also a story about parents and children, about Aasmaani trying to make peace with her strange childhood. It is a story about love, as Aasmaani and Shehnaz’s son find themselves drawn to each other. And there’s politics, to boot. The political backdrop—criticism of America, anxiety about the role of fundamentalists in Pakistani government—remains just that, a backdrop; it never overshadows, but rather somehow expands, the story.
Aasmaani herself is this strong novel’s greatest strength. She’s a remarkable narrator, in a thoroughly captivating tale.Pub Date: June 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-15-603053-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harvest/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2005
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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