Order from a Major Online Bookstore
Ultimate Book Price Comparison Engine
Save Your Time And Money
| AnyBook4Less.com | Order from a Major Online Bookstore |
|
| Home | Store List | FAQ | Contact Us | | ||
| Ultimate Book Price Comparison Engine Save Your Time And Money |
||
 |
Title: Brick Lane: A Novel by Monica Ali ISBN: 0-7432-4330-7 Publisher: Scribner Pub. Date: 09 September, 2003 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $25.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.44 (52 reviews)
Rating: 3
Summary: Not quite there...
Comment: I really looked forward to reading this book, having read so much about it. It is also a subject close to my heart, because I am a Bengali woman who doesn't live in her homeland. It began promisingly enough,(but what on earth was that about the rice stalks as tall as skyscrapers?)but doesn't keep it up. Most reviewers have complained about Hasina's letters to her sister. My understanding of them at the start, having tried to translate them back into Bengali, was that they were a literal, word for word translation from Bengali. They don't continue that way, but I think this is what the author intended.
The characters could have been fleshed out so much better. They felt cold and one-dimensional. I felt more of a connection with Zadie Smith's Samad and Alsana than with Nazneen. Chanu comes across a pompous, sorry figure...I know many men who are like Chanu, but they are usually less benign than he; men who know everything are usually more aggressive- it doesn't fit. Nazneen is not really shown growing as a person; all at once, she seems to acquire the courage to speak her mind. The ending-this is England, you can do anything- is reminiscent of Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni and Bharati Mukherjee,; that the West equals freedom. and it is impossible to be free in the Third World. Of course, she reminds us that women in Bangladesh get acid thrown on their faces; this is horrifying and has been going on for several years, though many of her readers will have heard of it for the first time.So, you are meant to think, isn't Nazneen lucky, that she escaped that? Ali also misses the fact that immigrant communities are usually steeped in the values of their homeland at the time they left, so that Bangladeshis in London might be more conservative than those in Dhaka or Mymensingh.
For Westerners, maybe this book is a bit of exotica, but I don't see what the fuss is about. It's not a bad book, but I doubt I'll remember it in 5 years time.
Rating: 5
Summary: Stimulating, uplifting and a great read
Comment: The sheer quality - of tone, of voice, of story - of Brick Lane is something that doesn't come along too often, even in these days of mass book publishing.
It's a universal story told with extraordinary technical skill. The qualities of the book have been compared to Jane Austen, Dickens and Dostoevsky. Yet the protagonist is the simplest of characters trying to lead the simplest of life.
Brick Lane seems to be winning as many popular reader awards as it is literary gongs and, given its readability, it can be little wonder that Barnes & Noble are publicising it for a year in their shop windows across America.
This book is for the intelligent, thoughtful reader who is willing to immerse themselves in literature, even temporarily, to see the world in a clearer way.
Take your time with this book and it will reward you greatly. It is an uplifting antidote to the increasingly brash, crass world we find ourselves within.
Rating: 4
Summary: The Strength of the Human Heart
Comment: The Strength of the Human Heart: Book Review of Brick Lane by Monica Ali, Scribner, 2003
This runaway British bestseller details the live of Nazeen, young Bengali woman transported to London as an arranged marriage nuptial.
Nazeen makes this book happen. She leads a host of supporting characters through daily life in their little slice of London life. Fleshing out the ranks behind her are: Razia, over-weight and self-absorbed; Chanu, the over-bearing bumpkin of a husband; Shahana, the shin-kicking teenage daughter, the brat whose neck you want to wring; Bibi, the loving, adoring and eager-to-please younger daughter; Hasina, the letter writing sister, and anchoring voice from her former home, Dhaka, Bengladesh; Ms. Islam, the stingy, hypochondriacal loanshark; Dr. Azad the learned doctor and unloved husband; Karim, the morally-upright, yet lustful, responsible yet irresponsible, handsome, virile, and available lover ...the list goes on. These characters spring to life in all of their various stages of non-linear, unpredictable complexity.
Through Nazeen's life, the reader gains access into London's Brick Lane where Bengalees has been transported. They are immigrants seeking the "better life". Their arrival is accompanied by cultural confusion and breakdown of traditional values. Their families are bombarded with drugs and other vicissitudes but in the end they learn the new ways, integrate new values into their lives and transform their identities.
As readers, we learn about the rural Bengaldesh of Nazeen's memory. She frequently returns to the land of her childhood, in dreams in fantasies, and in recollections, in her desire for things known. We are also shown the modern state of Bengaladesh as Chanu delivers sermons to his captive daughters and wife. We are driven into an English-Bengali life to then look out at white English people. Nazeen's unassuming anxiety about cultural clues gave me, a non-Bengali reader, insight into my own culture and cultural assumptions without having to travel to another land. It is unlikely that, even if I travelled to London or Dhaka, that I would have been privy to this life.
"But they were not aware of her. In the next instant she knew it. They could not see her any more than she could see God. They knew that she existed (just as she knew that He existed) but unless she did something, waved a gun, halted the traffic, they would not see her. She enjoyed this thought. She began to scrutinize. She stared at the long, thin faces, the pointy chins. The women had strange hair. It puffed up around their heads, pumped up like a snake's hood. They pressed their lips together and narrowed their eyes as though they were angry at something they had heard, or at the wind for messing their hair."
Our heroine is a woman that doesn't seem to know herself, just loves whom she loves, goes where she is sent, cooks what is expected that she cook. She changes, sometimes slowly, unassumingly and sometimes, rapidly and unexpectedly. She comes alive in her indecision, in her faith, in her lust, and in her confusion.
"Nazeen could not concentrate on her sewing. She watched the back of Karim's head, the strong lines his neck made. If she were to describe him to Hasina, what would she say?
That even when you knew you had not, you could end up believing you had said something that might change his life....She would say that he knew so many things. ...Chanu also knew many things but they only left him bewildered. If knowledge was food then while Karim grew strong on his intake, Chanu become only bloated, bilious, and pained. The made Karim made you feel was..."
She struggles with her faith, she is flawed, she has doen peculiar, idiosyncratic. For example, she has passed many hours in the night, standing at the kitchen counter eating, after her family is in bed; a thinking/non-thinking."For her, there was nothing else to be done. Nothing else that God wanted her to do. Sometimes she wanted to get up and run. Most of the time she did not want to run, but neither did she want to sit still. How difficult it was, this business of sitting still. But there was nothing really to complain of. There was Chanu, who was kind and never beat her. There was Raqib. And there was this shapeless, nameless thing that crawled across her shoulders and nested in her hair and poisoned her lungs, that made her both restless and listless."
This life goes-on-type of story lends strength to the human heart through the perseverance of the characters while holding the readers attention with like a spicy, aromatic, well-prepared dinner that will keep you reading through the night. The ending left me with the feeling of having gained more understanding about what it is to be human.
 |
Title: The Namesake : A Novel by Jhumpa Lahiri ISBN: 0395927218 Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Co Pub. Date: 16 September, 2003 List Price(USD): $24.00 |
 |
Title: The Known World by Edward P. Jones ISBN: 0060557540 Publisher: Amistad Press Pub. Date: 14 August, 2003 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
 |
Title: What Was She Thinking?: Notes on a Scandal: A Novel by Zoe Heller ISBN: 0805073337 Publisher: Henry Holt & Company, Inc. Pub. Date: 01 August, 2003 List Price(USD): $23.00 |
 |
Title: Vernon God Little: A 21st Century Comedy in the Presence of Death by D. B. C. Pierre ISBN: 1841954608 Publisher: Canongate Books Pub. Date: October, 2003 List Price(USD): $23.00 |
 |
Title: The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (Today Show Book Club #13) by Mark Haddon ISBN: 0385512104 Publisher: Doubleday Pub. Date: 31 July, 2003 List Price(USD): $22.95 |
Thank you for visiting www.AnyBook4Less.com and enjoy your savings!
Copyright� 2001-2021 Send your comments
