Posted in Coming-of-age, India, Literary on Jan 14th, 2011
Writing with wit and perception, Kiran Desai creates an elegant and thoughtful study of families, the losses each member must confront alone, and the lies each tells to make memories of the past more palatable. Sai Mistry is a young girl whose education at an Indian convent school comes to an end in the mid-1980s, when she is orphaned and sent to live with her grandfather, a judge who does not want her and who offers no solace. Living in a large, decaying house, her grandfather considers himself more British than Indian, far superior to hard-working but poverty-stricken people like his cook, Nandu, whose hopes for a better life for his son Biju are the driving force in his life. As Desai explores the aspirations of Sai and Biju, the hopes and expectations of their families, and their disconnections with their roots, she also creates vivid pictures of the friends and relatives who surround them, evoking vibrant images of a broad cross-section of society and revealing the social and political history of India. (On my Favorites list for 2006)
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Posted in Historical, Literary, US Regional on Jan 14th, 2011
When homesteader Leo Biedermann arrives in the plains of South Dakota in January,1882, during the most severe weather the area has seen in years, he immediately sets about building his house and barn, stocking the farm with cattle and horses, and planning his crops. The other homesteaders are astonished at his fortitude in the face of blizzards and bitterly cold weather, and though he is not friendly, they help him out when he needs machinery or a helping hand, and wish him well. When the first crops are harvested at the end of Biedermann’s first summer, Biedermann has managed to bring in the largest crop of all. Told through the journal of Gerhardt Praeger, a long-term settler with seven sons to help him on his farm, the narrative of Biedermann and his relationships with the other homesteaders unfolds. First published in 2007, this novel already feels like a classic, with its elegant and formal prose, its universal themes, its focus on a unique time and place, its broad vision of humanity with all its glories and faults, and its lack of artifice and sentimentality. Life is often harsh, but nowhere is life harsher than here in the lives of these Dakota homesteaders. (On my Favorites list for 2007)
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When Faye Travers, an estate agent in New Hampshire, inventories the home of John Jewett Tatro at the behest of his niece and heirs, she is aware that Tatro’s grandfather was once an Indian agent on an Ojibwe reservation and that his grandmother was Indian. Faye, of Indian heritage herself, is hoping to find some Indian artifacts that can be sold or donated to a museum on behalf of the estate. Neither Faye nor Sarah Tatro notices the drum, at first—three feet in diameter, hollowed out from a single piece of cedar wood and covered by a moose hide. Suddenly, the drum “speaks” to Faye, resonating with a single, deep note which only she hears. The story of the “Little Girl” drum (with no spoilers here) takes the reader from Faye’s life and love story in New Hampshire to an Ojibwe reservation in Minnesota. Tightly organized, with stories spanning three generations and interconnecting three different families—Faye Travers and her mother Elsie, Bernard Shaawano, and Shawnee and her mother Ira— The Painted Drum is a powerful novel which taps into universal feelings and hopes, even as it depicts some of life’s most terrible events. (On my Favorites list for 2005)
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Posted in England, Literary on Jan 14th, 2011
What a tale this is! With care and sensitivity, Murr creates a complex psychological portrait of Daniel Mulvaugh, the people who have affected his life, and those who have been affected by him. Feeling “incomplete” as a personality, and guilt-ridden about some events from his childhood, Daniel, now thirty-eight, admits that “it was when feeling was expected, needed, directed, that something in him refused to respond.” Having always chosen to avoid, rather than confront, emotional challenges, he has never been able to expiate his sense of guilt for actions from his childhood, and is now virtually alone, unable to function successfully as an adult. Murr is able to accomplish literary magic not only because of his sensitive psychological insights, but also because of his finely developed style. His observations are acute, and his descriptions, sometimes appearing almost as “throw-aways,” are unique. This is a beautifully wrought, carefully constructed, and totally absorbing novel about selfhood, our need to deal with our pasts, and the role of imagination in making life bearable. Powerful, stunning, and ultimately hopeful, this novel is a thought-provoking can’t-put-it-downer. (On my Favorites list for 2003)
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In this novel within a novel, Australian author Thomas Keneally returns to the political themes which won him prizes for The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, Voices from the Forest, and Schindler’s Ark. Keneally has always been at his best depicting ordinary people facing extraordinary pressures, especially from governments bent on totalitarian rule, and this contemporary allegory is no exception. Taking place in an unnamed oil-rich country in the Middle East ruled by a tyrant who calls himself Great Uncle, the novel centers on a man calling himself “Alan Sheriff,” a short story writer given one month to write an “autobiographical novel” for which Great Uncle will take full credit. Sheriff, we learn in the opening chapter, is telling his story to a western journalist from a detention camp in an unnamed desert country, where he has languished for three years.
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