Recovering fuddy-duddy Chandra is a droll creation, and his journey of self-realization feels like the real thing.
Once again this year, Cambridge professor P.R. Chandrasekhar has not won the Nobel Prize, and things are going to get worse before they get any better.
"Professor Chandra was the foremost trade economist in the world, could phone any finance minister in any country at any time and have them take his call." The fourth novel from Balasubramanyam (Starstruck, 2015, etc.) introduces its self-important antihero on the day he not only misses the Nobel, but is called on the carpet and asked to take a sabbatical because he has called a student an imbecile. On the way out, he is hit by a bicyclist and has a heart attack. Ordered to spend two months resting, he lies in bed and watches the entire first season of Friends, "finally understanding the jokes his children had made throughout the nineties." But Chandra has a great deal more to understand about his children; the simple relationships he had with them when they were small have long since soured. He has been estranged from his older daughter for several years, his son lives in Hong Kong and rarely visits, and his teenage daughter is in Colorado with his ex-wife, Jean, and her new husband, Steve. He goes to visit her in Boulder, but long-simmering resentments result in his punching Steve in the nose shortly after he arrives. In exchange for pretending to Jean that his injury was caused by swimming into the wall of the swimming pool, Steve—a highly evolved being who has spent much time in India—forces Chandra to enroll in a three-day workshop at Esalen, the famous retreat center/hot springs in Big Sur. Here, the professor's bumpy road to self-awareness begins, with a detailed but not too didactic presentation of exactly what goes on at "Being Yourself in the Summer Solstice." Post-Esalen, a crisis befalls the family that gives Chandra the opportunity to rebuild his relationships.
Recovering fuddy-duddy Chandra is a droll creation, and his journey of self-realization feels like the real thing.Pub Date: March 26, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-525-51138-0
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Dial Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 10, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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
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