If you came to this review because the title suggests that this is a romantic, even pretty, little novel of love in exotic India, then you will be shocked by what you discover here. This is a tough novel depicting what author Uday Prakash, controversial in his own country, sees as a major hurdle for India – not necessarily in the major cities so much as in the rural countryside. The economic changes in India in the 1990s have brought about a thriving middle class and a vibrant life in the cities, much of it “American style,” but those changes do not translate into similar changes in rural states, where traditional ways of life continue, including dramatic contrasts between the wealthy Brahmin class, which still controls the economic, political, and intellectual life of many areas, and the non-Brahmins who seem unable to rise, no matter how hard they try, because those very Brahmins also control most of the opportunities. A sweet love story between Rahul, a non-Brahmin student at a university in the state of Madhya Pradesh, and Anjali, the Brahmin daughter of the state minister of Public Works, provides the framework through which the author illustrates what he sees as a cultural crisis for the next generation
Read Full Post »
Although Irish author Colum McCann has written six previous books and a collection of stories, winning many literary prizes including both the National Book Award and the IMPAC Dublin Prize for his most recent novel, Let The Great World Spin, he has never before written a novel set primarily in his native Ireland. Transatlantic shows that it has been worth the wait. Always precise and insightful in his descriptions, and so in tune with his settings that they seem to breathe with his characters, McCann uses three different plot lines set in three different time periods to begin this new novel, and all three plots are connected intimately to Ireland. In the process, he also creates a powerful sense of how men and women, no matter where they start out, may become so inspired to reach seemingly impossible goals that they willingly risk all, including their lives, to achieve success, often in new places, away from “home.” Always, however, they remain connected to their pasts. Filled with insights and uniquely developed themes, this novel shows McCann at his most inspirational best.
Read Full Post »
Baron Luigi Alfredo Ricciardi di Malomonte, Commissario of Public Safety at the Royal Police Headquarters in Naples, is a lonely man. Growing up as the orphaned child of a wealthy family, he has been living with his Tata Rosa ever since. With a natural shyness that is close to terror when it comes to women, the thirty-year-old Ricciardi’s only real “friend” is his deputy, Brigadier Raffaele Maione, in whom he confides nothing about his private life. With his life secure because of his wealth, Ricciardi does not fear losing his job, but he often goes his own way in investigations if he feels justice will be better served. He has no fear of his department’s higher-ups, most of whom walk a fine line to avoid embarrassing government officials who, in 1931, are closely associated with Mussolini and his Fascists. Set in 1931 in the Sanita area of Naples, an area in which many families are eking out a living through long hours of work at service jobs, the author introduces a series of characters whose lives further develop during the novel but do not always overlap with each other, their stories often moving along separately with occasional connections to Ricciardi and Maione. By the time Ricciardi is called to investigate the gory murder of Carmela Calise, the fortune teller and money lender, Maione has already started to investigate the slashing and disfiguring of the beautiful Filomena Russo, who refuses to talk. As Ricciardi investigates, the case becomes broader, and he finds himself challenging his superiors.
Read Full Post »
Wildly imaginative and filled with scenes so vivid that the reader cannot help but participate in the story as it unwinds, Life After Life engages the reader from the outset with the novel’s ironic and seemingly contradictory premises: first, that everything here is real and nothing is real; and second, that everything changes and nothing changes. As the book’s title confirms, this is a novel in which there is a life after life – a life in which a character’s fate as described in the novel in one place is revisited and rewritten in new scenes in other places, creating a new fate or fates. The characters change as they move forward obliquely, learning from each set of new, changed circumstances as reality merges with fantasy to create a new reality in a new dimension. Despite all the structural and thematic cleverness (and even game-playing), the novel is neither weird nor esoteric. Instead, it is loads of fun, a book that speeds along on the strength of the author’s deft handling of details and her creation of lively characters who interest us as their circumstances change – moving us, sometimes, from grief to happiness or from delight to puzzlement.
Read Full Post »
Helen, a young croupier on the night shift at a London casino, is traveling home during the wee hours in a taxi shared with two co-workers. When they stop at a traffic light, two men, obviously homeless and perhaps drunk, arrogantly step out from the curb just as the the light is about to change and walk slowly, at their own pace, across the street, seeming to dare the stopped cars to move when the light turns green. Wild-looking, scraggy, and rather frightening, one man makes Helen pay attention, though she hunches down in the back of the taxi to avoid being seen. “Brian, it was Brian,” she thinks in astonishment, “her brother Brian,” whom she has not seen for twelve years. Stunned, she silently begins to make excuses for “Brian’s” behavior at the street crossing, applying her memories of Brian’s mild personality to the behavior of the younger of the two strange men on the street. Establishing some of the novel’s main themes in this opening scene, which is more dramatic because of the violence which does not take place, author James Kelman follows Helen from that moment with “Brian” to her arrival at the home she shares with her six-year-old daughter and Mo, a South Asian man who represents “normality” to her. For the next twenty-four hours, Kelman keeps the reader inside Helen’s head as she tries to sort out her life and figure where she may be going.
Read Full Post »
