A story of enough provocative, sensual grace to have fueled Scheherazade for a 1,002nd night.
Finding universals in the particulars of a father’s short dalliance with a married woman, framed within the context of late-colonial India.
At the beginning of this 11th and concluding volume in his Continents of Exile series (All for Love, 2001, etc.), the India-born, blind author Mehta recounts an incident that occurred when he was a young man living in New York. The neighborhood cobbler addresses him as “Mr. Mehta” and tells him how much he liked his recent book. Mehta’s appalled reaction (“How dare he be so familiar with me?”) suggests the burden laid on him by his sense of propriety. And propriety will be sorely tested when his father suggests that Mehta help him with a novel he’s writing, the story of an idealistic young doctor working in the hill country who falls in love with a shepherd girl and rails against the abuse she suffers at the hands of the local Nawat: The tale’s verisimilitude ignites in Mehta a suspicion that this may be creative nonfiction, but he can only approach the subject gingerly: “In the balance were my lifelong glowing notions of his rectitude and the purity and stability of his forty-nine-year-long marriage to my mother.” Mehta cultivates the ground of his father’s affair with great sensitivity, painting the peerless backdrop of the Simla hill station and explaining the norms at play. (“Nothing was more important than to keep the reputation of the family pure and unbesmirched.”) His mother handled the situation “with good humor and good cheer,” observing of the lover, who was also her close friend: “She came like a butterfly and went away like a butterfly.” At the heart of the story are the pair’s love letters, each of which Mehta displays to best advantage in all their fragility, expressing wonder at their survival in a world of rapid transformation.
A story of enough provocative, sensual grace to have fueled Scheherazade for a 1,002nd night.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2004
ISBN: 1-56025-628-1
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Nation Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2004
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IN THE NEWS
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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