FAMILY MATTERS

Name: FAMILY MATTERS
Author: Rohinton Mistry
ISBN: 0-375-40373-6

by Rohinton Mistry ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 1, 2002

Nevertheless, a powerfully lurid picture of Bombay’s multiplicity, energy, and squalor is built up with masterly skill. And...

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A Dickensian sense of the interconnections of place, character, and fate and a powerful rendering of the experience and consequences of aging and bodily decay—such are the great strengths of this absorbing third novel from the Indian-born Canadian resident (A Fine Balance, 1996, etc.).

Mistry is a deservedly much-honored writer who has won Canada’s Governor General’s Award and the Commonwealth Writers Prize. And he achieves a real triumph with this story’s wonderful protagonist: 79-year-old retired professor Nariman Vakeel, whom we meet in the lavish Bombay apartment (in a building called “Chateau Felicity”) he shares with his intemperate stepdaughter Coomy and her passive brother Jal. In lengthy flashbacks, Nariman recalls the great mistake of his earlier years: forsaking the Catholic woman he loved, and yielding to parental pressure to marry the Parsi widow who meant nothing to him—as her children (Coomy and Jal) have long known. When Nariman breaks an ankle, his stepchildren (a virtual Goneril and Regan) send him to live with the family of his natural daughter, Roxana Chenoy, in a crowded, filthy tenement—where Nariman slides into helplessness, and Roxana patiently bears this new burden. The King Lear–derived plot is handled beautifully (especially whenever Mistry enters Nariman’s consciousness). But efforts to broaden the story’s scope seem, by comparison, forced—especially in sequences detailing the desperate grasp for upward mobility made by Roxana’s husband Yezad, whose yearnings for a better life for his family propel him toward gambling and crime (a development ironically echoed by the schoolboy “career” of manipulative exploitation pursued by the Chenoys’ elder son Jehangir).

Nevertheless, a powerfully lurid picture of Bombay’s multiplicity, energy, and squalor is built up with masterly skill. And the characters of Nariman and the Gandhi-inspired Roxana (her father’s Cordelia) are not easily forgotten.

Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2002

ISBN: 0-375-40373-6

Page Count: 448

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2002

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
A FINE BALANCE
by Rohinton Mistry

- BOOK REVIEW
SUCH A LONG JOURNEY
by Rohinton Mistry

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IF CATS DISAPPEARED FROM THE WORLD

by Genki Kawamura ; translated by Eric Selland ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 12, 2019

Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.

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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

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

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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.