Often exquisite; too often, too much of a good thing.
The “honour killing” of two unmarried lovers casts long shadows over several related lives, in a second novel by the Pakistani-born British author.
Following Aslam’s debut (Season of the Rainbirds, 1993) by so many years, this is an understandably painstakingly crafted exploration of cultural conflict, set in a Pakistani enclave (Dasht-e-Tanhaii, meaning, roughly, “desert of solitude”) within an unnamed English town. The victims of the aforementioned crime are Jugnu, a lepidopterist, and Chanda, the thrice-married, twice-divorced sister of middle-aged protagonist Shamas. A failed poet now employed as a social worker, Shamas offers a mediating voice between the commands of Islamic law (literally obeyed by Chanda’s brothers, who killed her and Jugnu to punish their immorality) and the less stringent imperatives of contemporary British culture. A further contrast exists between the well-meaning Shamas and (the tale’s other major figure) his wife Kaukab, a rigorously devout Muslim for whom sexual irregularity is only one of numerous “sins” subject to the harshest draconian penalties. Thus does Aslam’s lovely title embrace not only the ill-fated couple and Kaukab and Shamas, but also the latter couple’s three adult children: notably, their daughter Suraya, divorced in an irrational moment by her drunken husband, and disallowed from reuniting with him, without first marrying, then divorcing another man. The great and genuine strength here is the fairness with which Aslam presents all viewpoints (his portrayal of Kaukab, a woman of very real principle nevertheless tormented by the beliefs she holds with utmost sincerity, is a particular triumph). But Aslam overstates and sentimentalizes Shamas’s selfless saintly decency, and drowns the story in a gratuitously exotic and sensuous hothouse atmosphere evoked by ludicrously strained imagery (during oral sex, a woman’s body is “as eloquent as weather”; roses die, “each round rosehip with its tall crown of long hairy sepals looking as though a berry has fused with a grasshopper”).
Often exquisite; too often, too much of a good thing.Pub Date: May 8, 2005
ISBN: 1-4000-4242-9
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Knopf
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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