A compact novel that crackles with tension, tracing the tangled path of a family's dissolution in their sudden rise to...
Shanbhag, in his English-language debut, seamlessly translated from the Kannada by Perur, explores the turbid and ominous undercurrents running beneath a family’s newfound success and the society from which it sprang.
In his native city of Bangalore, the narrator, a young married man, sits in an elegant cafe with the incongruously functional name Coffee House, desperate to speak with the waiter, Vincent. The man, a regular customer, has such faith in Vincent’s oracular wisdom that his wife will sometimes ask him, "Did you visit your temple today?" But now he fears what Vincent might have to say, and, while he vacillates over whether to seek Vincent’s counsel, he recounts what it is that brought him here: the story of his family. Once living on the razor’s edge of financial ruin, the young man’s family is catapulted to a life of plenty and idleness when his father is let go from his job as a coffee salesman and invests his pension in his uncle’s new business, Sona Masala, the sole service of which is purported to be repackaging spices. The young man is made director in the company but soon finds that he has no say in, no insight into, and no work to do within the company, and he comes to his office only to nap on his couch and collect a generous salary. While some family members sink into feckless denial of their uncle’s questionable morality, others savor the power it brings them. As the family once took cold pleasure in destroying the ants that invaded the run-down rented house of their poorer past, they exult in using intimidation and occasional violence to ward off anyone they view as a potential threat to their way of life.
A compact novel that crackles with tension, tracing the tangled path of a family's dissolution in their sudden rise to wealth.Pub Date: Feb. 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-14-311168-9
Page Count: 124
Publisher: Penguin
Review Posted Online: Nov. 21, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2016
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
A tour de force.
In 1974, a troubled Vietnam vet inherits a house from a fallen comrade and moves his family to Alaska.
After years as a prisoner of war, Ernt Allbright returned home to his wife, Cora, and daughter, Leni, a violent, difficult, restless man. The family moved so frequently that 13-year-old Leni went to five schools in four years. But when they move to Alaska, still very wild and sparsely populated, Ernt finds a landscape as raw as he is. As Leni soon realizes, “Everyone up here had two stories: the life before and the life now. If you wanted to pray to a weirdo god or live in a school bus or marry a goose, no one in Alaska was going to say crap to you.” There are many great things about this book—one of them is its constant stream of memorably formulated insights about Alaska. Another key example is delivered by Large Marge, a former prosecutor in Washington, D.C., who now runs the general store for the community of around 30 brave souls who live in Kaneq year-round. As she cautions the Allbrights, “Alaska herself can be Sleeping Beauty one minute and a bitch with a sawed-off shotgun the next. There’s a saying: Up here you can make one mistake. The second one will kill you.” Hannah’s (The Nightingale, 2015, etc.) follow-up to her series of blockbuster bestsellers will thrill her fans with its combination of Greek tragedy, Romeo and Juliet–like coming-of-age story, and domestic potboiler. She re-creates in magical detail the lives of Alaska's homesteaders in both of the state's seasons (they really only have two) and is just as specific and authentic in her depiction of the spiritual wounds of post-Vietnam America.
A tour de force.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-312-57723-0
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Oct. 30, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2017
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