A pleasure to read and a welcome window on a world we know too little about.
Picaresque, politically shaded novel of life in 20th-century Pakistan, a country and time fading into memory and rife with nostalgia.
The good old days weren’t always so good—but they weren’t so bad, either. Yousufi, well-known in Pakistan but, at the age of 92, just emerging outside that country, delivers a rollicking epic told through the person of one Basharat Ali Farooqi, a bit of a sad sack who constantly makes tough luck for himself: “Now Basharat began to regret his foolishness: why had he loaded into a ramshackle car goods worth twice the car’s amount?” So goes a typical moment, with Basharat wishing a thief would come along and relieve him of his worries and instead courting the attention of the police on a different count. Basharat is nothing if not aspirational, though he seldom succeeds in rising to the rascally heights of his father-in-law, Qibla, who has the look of a devil about him: “His big eyes bulged from their sockets. They were always bloodshot—really bloodshot. As red as pigeon’s blood.” Fearful countenance aside, Qibla is a fellow whose schemes never quite work out according to plan, either. Caught up in the chaos of India and Pakistan at the time of the 1947 partition, Basharat, Qibla, and Yousufi’s other characters do what they can to get by, discovering that if you can’t go home again, you can’t go elsewhere, either. Yousufi writes of the most serious events with balloon-puncturing good humor, and his chapter titles alone are worth the price of admission: “Do Lizards Breastfeed?” “The Teachers Have Eaten Up the Orphanage!” “I Was Punished for the Horny Camel’s Misdeeds.” Doubtless Yousufi courted the displeasure of fundamentalists and nationalists in writing this novel, published in Urdu in 1990; the introduction, good and substantial though it is, might have done a touch more to set it in its context and discuss its reception. But that’s a quibble unworthy of Qibla.
A pleasure to read and a welcome window on a world we know too little about.Pub Date: July 7, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8112-2413-0
Page Count: 574
Publisher: New Directions
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2015
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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