Category Archives: British Asian

May 16, 2013 · 1:13 pm

The Blind Man’s Garden by Nadeem Aslam

Blind Man's GardenWho needs films when writers like Nadeem Aslam can create such eloquent canvases that no celluloid could ever hope to project? Blind Man’s Garden takes you deep into the tragic ‘war on terror’ and shows you the very lives of the individuals who must live through (or not) the shattering decisions of faraway leaders, governments, and regimes.

Mikal and Jeo grow up as brothers in a small town in Pakistan – Jeo is the son of former schoolmaster Rohan who takes in Mikal and his older brother Basie when they lose their own parents. When Jeo, training to be a doctor, secretly decides to go to Afghanistan in hopes of caring for the human collateral damage from the post-9/11 U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, Mikal immediately decides to join him.

Both young men leave behind their shared family, including the same beloved, Naheed – she who loved Mikal first, but married Jeo at last. The brothers embark on a Odyssean journey to nowhere fueled by a fierce hope to return home. With all their fates unknown, Naheed mourns and waits, her mother Tara desperately fights what she believes is inevitable, and Rohan attempts to save another man’s young boy as he was unable to save his late wife from eternal damnation. The family, splintered by ideologies and violence gone awry, will never be the same again … and yet somehow, a much-transformed new family will inevitably survive …

In spite of needing to finish Aslam’s fourth and latest novel because of a looming interview deadline (I know, lucky me!), I lost all my usual reading alacrity as I approached book’s end, so as to avoid actually reaching that final page. Now as I ready myself for the authorly exchange, I’m bereft that that preparation cost me any lingering comfort of knowing I still had more Aslam to read. Alas, I must settle into waiting mode for his next novel; and patience was never, ever my virtue.

Readers: Adult

Published: 2013

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April 15, 2013 · 9:33 am

Five Star Billionaire by Tash Aw

Five Star Billionaire* STARRED REVIEW
Think of Tash Aw‘s third novel as an ingenious game called “How To Be a Billionaire.” A how-to guide is interspersed with 30 rules that also serve as chapters, e.g., “Move to Where the Money Is,” “Always Rebound After Each Failure,” “Strive To Understand the Big Picture.” The playing board is Shanghai, that 21st-century city of limitless possibility; the power broker is the eponymous Five Star Billionaire. A quartet of players – all Malaysian immigrants – are revealed one by one: country girl Phoebe, real estate heir Justin, pop superstar Gary, and businesswoman Yinghui, who is about to multiply her success. Aw moves fluidly between past and present, creating a multilayered narrative about chasing, catching, and sometimes losing elusive opportunities.

Verdict: London-based Aw, who spent a year in Shanghai on a writing fellowship, has honed his experiences into a literary victory. Admirers of Aw’s The Harmony Silk Factory, which won a Whitbread Book Award (renamed the Costa Book Awards in 2006) and a Commonwealth Prize and was long-listed for the Man Booker, and Map of the Invisible World will clamor to read this, his best thus far. Fiction aficionados with international tastes will surely fall in line as well.

Review: “Fiction,” Library Journal, April 15, 2013

Readers: Adult

Published: 2013

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April 11, 2013 · 5:19 pm

Between the Assassinations by Aravind Adiga

Between the AssassinationsFor fans of Aravind Adiga‘s unforgettable 2008 Booker Prized first novel, The White Tiger, who were perhaps not as enthralled with his 2011 follow-up, Last Man in Tower, might I suggest you look backward a few more years to his very first book? Introduced to eager readers just after Adiga’s Booker win, Between the Assassinations was actually written before Tiger in spite of getting to the presses a little later.

With intriguing cleverness, Assassinations is an interlinked short story collection, presented as something like a tourist guide, introduced with a town map and a note, “Arriving in Kittur.” Located between Goa and Calicut on India’s southwestern coast, the three months following the monsoon season which ends in September “are the best time to visit Kittur. Given the town’s richness of history and scenic beauty, and diversity of religion, race, and language, a minimum stay of a week is recommended,” the guide advises.

That seven-day set-up which Adiga used with such success in The White Tiger, works equally well here. Presented as a ‘what-to-do’ schedule during seven days and nights in Kittur, Adiga embellishes each suggested go-to location with a related narrative. On arriving the first day into the railway station, Adiga offers the story of a young Muslim boy who initially works in a nearby “tea-and-samosa place” and moves from job to job – for awhile counting all the incoming and outgoing trains for a seemingly fancy stranger – unsure of his coming future.

On Day Two, you might go to Lighthouse Hill and see what happens when a bookseller who’s already been arrested 21 times for offering illegally photocopied books begins to sell Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses. In the evening, you might visit the Market and Maidan, and meet Keshava who came from a small village two years ago, only to learn how disposable human life can be in a big city. On Day Four, Umbrella Street – Kittur’s commercial center – will introduce you to Chenayya who is not so young, who needs all his energy to deliver furniture throughout the city. On Day Five while you stroll by the Cathedral of Our Lady of Valencia, you might meet George who is convinced a “princess” will save him from a life of drudgery. On Day Seven at the Salt Market Village, perhaps you’ll see Murali, who at 55, might be coming to the realization that he has wasted his privileged life for an uncompromising cause when what he really longs for is a family of his own.

Populating streets, buildings, and neighborhoods with an array of characters with multiple stories – hopeful and bittersweet both – Adiga presents a multi-dimensional view of a bustling town on the verge of drastic change, caught at the crossroads of inescapable backgrounds and fresh new ideas. If you choose to visit Kittur aurally, rest assured that narrator Harsh Nayyar literally breathes life into Adiga’s workers and dreamers, politicians and escapists, students and fathers. Go ahead, take the trip – travel couldn’t be easier: by book or by iPod, Kittur awaits.

Readers: Adult

Published: 2009

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Filed under ..Adult Readers, .Audio, .Fiction, .Short Stories, British Asian, Indian

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March 27, 2013 · 11:00 am

The Wasted Vigil by Nadeem Aslam

Wasted VigilIn both content and form, The Wasted Vigil is a book of extremes. For readers who have experienced Nadeem Aslam before (and the apt word really is ‘experience’), you’ll recognize (and be awed by) his mesmerizing prose … allow me a moment to share this early quote about books and reading (of course): “Each beloved book has more than one copy – some small with the text crowded into perhaps too few pages, others where the print and the page are both generously proportioned. … Sometimes there is a need to take pleasure in a favourite book for its story line alone, and the smaller editions facilitate this because the eye moves fast along a closely printed page. At other times one wishes to savour language – the rhythm of sentences, the precision with which a given word has been studded into a phrase – and on such occasions the larger size helps to slow one down, pause at each comma. Dawdling within a landscape.”

Here in his landscape of extremes, Aslam wields his language like a weapon, his mellifluous prose in cutting contrast to the horrific acts witnessed in the name of god, patriotism, honor, truth, and even love. Each of Aslam’s main characters experiences that all-encompassing sort of love, even as that love is destroyed – or, at the very least, fatally shattered – by the most inhumane atrocities.

Vigil weaves in and out of the neverending turbulent decades of Afghanistan’s modern history, its citizens brutalized by the British, Soviets, Taliban, and the Americans. Outside Jalalabad, by a lake believed to be haunted by angry djinn, in a remote house filled with the spirit of missing loved ones, four lost souls gather – their lives criss-crossed and overlapping with tragedy. The home belongs to Marcus, a British ex-pat doctor now 70, who lost his Afghan wife and his hand to the Taliban. He welcomes a Russian woman Lara, recently widowed, who searches for answers to her soldier brother’s disappearance during the Soviet invasion.

While Marcus is out on yet another possible search for a grandson he has never met, he unexpectedly runs into David, a former CIA operative whose life once evolved around Marcus’ only daughter Zameen, now dead. The trio grows into a temporary foursome when an injured young fundamentalist Muslim, Casa, is saved by the very westerners he has been taught to abhor, and trained to destroy.

Basil Sands’ excellent narration breathes life into four disparate characters – and others, as well – as they attempt to find, if not the truth, then a sense of peace with what has happened to family, friends, an entire country. But the house and its occupants are caught between two vicious warlords – one sanctioned by the U.S. government – and they cannot prevent imminent destruction from reaching their doors …

In various interviews, Aslam, who is Pakistani-born, UK-domiciled and educated since his teen years, has spoken about traveling extensively through Pakistan and Afghanistan in order to write Vigil, as well as interviewing some 200 Afghan refugees living in Britain. His international, peripatetic background places Aslam simultaneously on both ‘sides’ of incomprehensible conflict; surely, that unique dissonance imbues Vigil with its unfathomable opposites – its terror and beauty, its deception and truth, its abhorrent hatred and unconditional love.

Readers: Adult

Published: 2008

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October 29, 2012 · 4:44 pm

Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall by Kazuo Ishiguro

How wrenchingly ironic that this was the book I happened to be reading when I learned of a sudden death in our family. On the flight, in the car, during the rare moments of aloneness over the last four days, Kazuo Ishiguro’s stories that spoke of lost chances and endings provided an ideal counterpoint – both gentle and piercing – to the maelstrom of required public and private events of mourning.

Nocturnes – Ishiguro’s only short story collection thus far, as well as his latest title – is comprised of five stories in which music plays a principal role. Some are interlinked: two share characters, two share locations. In the opening “Crooner,” a young guitarist is hired by once legendary singer Tony Gardner – who was the guitarist’s mother’s favorite star – to play underneath Gardner’s wife’s open window as Gardner sings her love songs on the final evening of their bittersweet Venetian vacation. Lindy Gardner, that very wife who is now divorced, reappears in the (singular) “Nocturne,” recovering from cosmetic surgery in a posh Los Angeles hotel, sharing musical adventures with a saxophone player whose agent, soon-to-be ex-wife, and her lover convince the gifted musician that his less-than-gorgeous looks are the only obstacle to major success. In the finale, “Cellists,” the story returns to Venice, perhaps to the same transient band in “Crooners,” in which possibly another member – this time a Hungarian cellist – meets another American musician who nurtures and refines his already considerable talents … but to what end?

Of the remaining two pieces not linked to the three above, both feature troubled ménage à trois-of-sorts: “Come Rain or Come Shine” examines a trio-friendship decades after its university beginnings, in which the loner – a jazz purist – visits the couple on the verge of separation; in “Malvern Hills,” a struggling young British musician finds himself unexpectedly, intimately wedged in between a Swiss couple on their countryside holiday.

For Ishiguro devotees, Nocturnes might prove to be lighter fare than his six previous novels (and, yes, I’ve read each with fervent reverence). While each of the brief movements of this quintet are memorably haunting, the short story form just doesn’t allow enough space for the soulful, detailed, exquisite explorations that define Ishiguro’s longer work. That said, for an enhanced experience, I highly recommend the narrated version, made noteworthy with careful phrasing and added accents, especially as voiced by Mark Bramhall who begins and ends the audible collection.

Read (or listen) … the best music will always move you to tears, no?

Readers: Adult

Published: 2009

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August 13, 2012 · 10:06 am

Food and Faith by Susan Reuben and Sophie Pelham

Six children, six different faiths … while their holy days and festivals vary, the one thing they share – that we all share, regardless of the specifics of our backgrounds – are special foods we share with family and friends to celebrate memorable occasions.

Francesca is Christian and eats turkey for Christmas and chocolate eggs at Easter. Jacob is Jewish and shares challah during Shabbat and matzah during Passover. Aneesa is Muslim, so she only eats foods that are halal, and when she is old enough, she, too, will fast during Ramadan. Francis is Buddhist, and he helps prepare and serve meals to the monks and nuns because Buddhists believe that giving food is an honor. Akhil is Hindu and is vegetarian because Hindus practice ahimsa, or non-violence, including toward animals. And Tavleen is Sikh, and Sikh families take turns preparing the langar, the communal meal everyone enjoys after service.

Originally released by a British press, American readers might notice some slight variations, especially in vocabulary: for example, for Christians across the Pond, the Tuesday before Lent is called Shrove Tuesday, while their American cousins tend to call it Fat Tuesday, or more so Mardi Gras, a name which is French is origin. That variations exist even within the same faith, is a great reminder that god (in all his/her supreme incarnations) is not in the details … while the traditions, rules, texts, foods may be different, the bonds of family and the respect for community are the same throughout.

The overemphasis on our religious differences surely contributed to the country’s latest hate crime. As we mourn for the victims and their families of the Sikh temple shooting in Oak Creek, Wisconsin on August 5, 2012, we need regular reminders that the shared ideals supporting family and community are what should bring us all together.

Through words and photographs, author and artist choose six children and their families, each of whom could easily be your best friend, your neighbor, your colleague, your child’s buddy. At the risk of sounding Pollyanna-ish, gazing at these children’s open, trusting faces offers great hope. Surely our faith in nurturing our families – especially our children – and creating community, can bond us beyond our labels so that we might all celebrate our individual uniqueness … together.

Readers: Children, Middle Grade

Published: 2012

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Filed under ..Children/Picture Books, ..Middle Grade Readers, .Nonfiction, British, British Asian, Nonethnic-specific

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May 21, 2012 · 12:21 pm

Gods without Men by Hari Kunzru

Most of the time, I love stories that require fitting together seemingly disjointed pieces; my brain feels delightfully tickled with the challenge. And, of Hari Kunzru‘s novels – Gods being his fourth and latest – I much appreciated both The Impressionist and Transmission [no, I've not yet read My Revolutions but expect to eventually].

Oh, but that ‘but’ … Perhaps the aging cerebrum is getting tired, perhaps I should have read the page with my own eyeballs instead of having the sprawling, multi-centuried novel read to me by a phalanx of seasoned narrators (I admit I so enjoyed hearing Rupert Degas‘ voice again, I immediately downloaded a Haruki Murakami title, only to find Degas isn’t its reader, alas). And yet as much as I appreciated the high puzzling-factor of Gods, the final reaction is a sighing disappointment.

Central to the many narrative strands is a family and a location: the Matharu family includes a Sikh American mathematically-inclined Wall Street-er, his culturally Jewish Caucasian American wife, and their autistic young son who goes missing near the recurring location, called the Pinnacles somewhere in the Mojave Desert (not to be confused with Pinnacles National Monument further north near Salinas, California). [I don't mean to digress (too far), but did anyone else think it rather unfathomable that caring parents would leave their young sleeping child strapped in his stroller totally alone in a national park while they wander off to explore?]

In between explicating Jaz Matharu’s development – the expectations placed on him as the eldest son of a devout immigrant Punjabi family, his MIT career, the “‘cultural differences’” of his out-marriage, his challenging only child, his moral misgivings at work, the nightmare of his missing son – Kunzru dovetails numerous story fragments across time, continents, and cultures. Interrupting (sometimes enhancing) the family drama are 18th-century Padres on mysterious missions to a new world desert, a deranged late 19th-century silver miner about to implode, a decorated World War I veteran with a hideously burnt face desperately trying to preserve a Native language in 1920 who will (not) resurface in 1942, a young engineer who builds a bunker to welcome UFOs in 1947 who possibly reappears as the Guide during a 1958 supernatural convention when another child disappears, other-world cult followers who scatter by 1971, a young (Goth!) Iraqi immigrant teenager hired to participate in simulated scenarios of soldiers invading Iraqi homes on a 2008 desert military base, and still more …!

Not that a neat, easy ending should be expected out of this whirling maelstrom, but after almost 400 pages (or 14.5 audible hours), too many questions feel unanswered and narrative possibilities scattered. To quote Kunzru’s final sentence, “Here ends the redacted passage,” felt all too accurate – that indeed, things vital and necessary had somehow been censored, obscured, removed, and ultimately lost.

Readers: Adult

Published: 2012

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August 1, 2011 · 3:00 pm

Author Interview: Tahmima Anam

In spite of the fierce, wrenching content of her books, Tahmima Anam in real life is a gentle, warm, incredibly youthful presence. We met in livetime a few years ago in Washington, DC, as her debut novel, A Golden Age, was winning major international awards, including the 2008 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book. Recognizing the literary stardom to come, Anam was the earliest invitee to the Smithsonian Institution’s 2008 South Asian Literary and Theater Arts Festival [SALTAF], an annual public program of the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Program (my then-day job that came with serendipitous literary perks for sure). By the time Anam landed in DC from London almost 11 months after that initial invite, she had earned some well-deserved, hefty accolades.

Tahmima Anam’s impressive debut, A Golden Age, is the first of a trilogy set in Bangladesh, before, during, and after the War of Independence that ended in 1971 with the birth of Bangladesh as a new nation separate from Pakistan. Anam’s first protagonist is Rehana Haque, who while still mourning the sudden loss of her too-young husband, loses custody of her young son and daughter to a scheming brother-in-law. Separated for a year with her children faraway in Lahore while she remains in Dhaka, Rehana – in spite of what seems to be the impossible trap of young widowhood without a clear means of support – manages to reunite with her children out of sheer will, determined she will never lose them again. In 1971 when the people of Bangladesh declare independence from Pakistan, Rehana is no longer certain how she can protect her children during a horrific time marked by betrayal and terror. But neither will she remain a silent bystander while civil war threatens to destroy her family, friends, and adopted country.

From Rehana, Anam shifts her focus to the Haque children in The Good Muslim, the second book of her Bengal Trilogy which debuts this month. For the first time since the war, Rehana, her son Sohail, and daughter Maya are under the same roof … and yet their physical reunion is overshadowed by emotional disconnection. Sohail’s wife has just passed away when Maya returns home, leaving behind shocking violence in the small village where she was a doctor for several years. She is tired and spent, having witnessed the too-often subjugation of women just for being women. She can’t comprehend Sohail’s new religious fervor since his return from the war, his reinvention as a revered Muslim leader, nor his unbending rules and expectations in the name of a god that Maya can’t accept as absolute. Sohail’s devotion to his faith leaves him blind to his utterly neglected son – a frail young boy, unwashed, clothed in tatters, thieving, lying, and yet the only request he voices regularly is to be able to go to school. Bypassing her brother’s objections, Maya tries to at least provide her nephew with a basic literacy, but her attempts at enlightenment have tragic consequences.

Born in Dhaka, Bangladesh in 1975, currently domiciled in London, Anam’s writerly strength is driven by a sharply observant imagination that allows her to recreate a time before she was born, before she had access to her memory. Surely her international upbringing in Paris, New York City, and Bangkok – thanks to her father’s peripatetic UN career –  instilled in her a broad understanding of humanity in diverse situations. Her privileged education – undergrad at Mount Holyoke, PhD in social anthropology at Harvard (yes, that’s Dr. Anam!) – made sure that xenophobia was never even a glimmering possibility in her questioning mind.

Catching up this time via phone lines strung under the Pond from DC to London, Anam was as soft-spoken as ever. That she spoke about war, corruption, imprisonment, and even rape, rarely changed her firm but even tone. She was also sure to balance the tragedy with joyful moments of family, love, and even someday-children. As expected, her ability to explicate and engage made an hour-plus pass all too quickly …

This year, Bangladesh is celebrating its 40th birthday. You were born four years later, and have now lived through much of your country’s tumultuous history, the vast changes, improvements, and challenges. What are some of your immediate thoughts about your birth country during this celebratory time?
I feel it’s a mixed bag. The good news is the incredible progress that has been made in major areas: we’ve been a functioning democracy for the last 20 years after a tumultuous period of martial law and army rule. The world of micro-credit founded by Muhammad Yunus and his Grameen Bank has changed so many people’s lives, especially among the very poor. The fact that 95% of the borrowers are women means many improvements for women especially. Through microcredit and state investment in girls’ education, women are becoming economically powerful. They’re sending their daughters to school, they’re managing their homes, and taking jobs. Bangladesh has a strong feminist movement; women are advocating for legal changes to the constitution for more equitable rights.

In addition to the progress, I’m aware of a lot of problems, especially the threat of climate change. In spite of being a democracy, our government has a top-down political power structure. The people suffer because of corruption.

We need more democracy, less corruption. [... click here for more]

Author interview: Feature: “An Interview with Tahmima Anam,” Bookslut.com, August 2011

Readers: Adult

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July 18, 2011 · 9:15 am

The Good Muslim by Tahmima Anam

Tahmima Anam continues her outstanding Bengal Trilogy, which began with A Golden Age, her glowing 2008 debut that propelled Anam into a privileged literary circle filled with international accolades. From Rehana Haque, the protagonist mother in Age, Anam shifts her focus to the grown Haque children in her second book which hits U.S. shelves in just a couple of weeks.

For the first time since the Bangladesh war of independence finally ended, Rehana, her son Sohail, and daughter Maya are all under the same roof … and yet their physical reunion is overshadowed by emotional disconnection. Sohail’s wife has just passed away when Maya returns home, leaving behind shocking violence in the small village where she was a doctor for several years. Maya is tired and spent, having witnessed the too-often subjugation of women just for being women.

Maya can’t comprehend Sohail’s new religious fervor since his return from the war, his reinvention as a revered Muslim leader, nor his unbending rules and expectations in the name of a god that Maya can’t accept as absolute. Sohail’s devotion to his faith leaves him blind to his utterly neglected son – a thin young boy, unwashed, clothed in tatters, thieving, lying, and yet the only request he voices regularly is to be able to go to school. Bypassing her brother’s objections, Maya tries to at least provide her nephew with basic literacy, but her attempts at enlightenment have tragic consequences.

As Bangladesh celebrates 40 years of independent country-hood, Anam’s intimate, vivid new title appears just in time as both testimony of endured brutality, and a reminder of the difficult choices survivors faced once the violence finally subsided. That survival always comes with a price: Sohail’s search for redemption takes him in one extreme direction, while Maya chooses a very different path. And Rehana – her silences more telling perhaps than her words can be – watches as her children’s lives diverge further and further from one another, and eventually from hers as well.

Readers: Adult

Published: 2011

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April 5, 2011 · 11:15 am

The Story of Lee (vol. 1) by Seán Michael Wilson and Chie Kutsuwada

The greatest strength of this series debut is, without a doubt, the art: the first spread, for example, captures the eponymous Lee gliding along on her bike, then the shock of a narrowly-missed collision with an elderly woman, and the embarrassed apology as she picks up her scattered belongings. The story, however, is another matter … but you can be the judge in this case.

Lee is 24, working for her father in the family’s small grocery store in Hong Kong. She dreams of British punk bands and overseas adventures while her father keeps pushing her to date Wang, a young man of his choice, and settle down to a secure future.

But then Lee meets a Matt, a handsome blond foreigner from Edinburgh who comes in to use the copy machine to duplicate his poems. Sparks fly. Lee’s father is hardly supportive so Lee has to sneak out when she can. Cultural differences (no surprise) threaten to keep the lovebirds apart, but Lee’s worldly uncle arrives deus ex machina-style and saves her future …

In spite of the predictable events, the story definitely has some sweet moments: Lee’s relationship with her frail grandmother, her easy-going bond with her widowed uncle. But here’s where that predictability causes an eyeball to roll: of course, Matt turns out to be an Asiaphile, but Lee actually falls for lines like “Girls in this part of the world are number one … I’m constantly amazed by how good-looking they are. It’s not fair on the rest of the world! He he …”

Do I really even need to add any further comments?

Readers: Young Adult, Adult

Published: 2010

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