Lingerie Canada Biography
Source:- Google.com.pkReviewed by Penelope Mortimer
"What I don't want," Arundhati Roy recently declared, "is to receive a lot of patronisingly respectful reviews. I would rather be judged harshly by the highest standards."
This is her first novel, centred on a middle-class family living in Ayemenem, a remote village in western India. Ammu has left her alcoholic husband in Aswan and returned with her twins, Rahu and Estha, to the family home, where her brother, Chacko, manages their mother's pickle factory. His English ex-wife, Margaret Kochamma, has remarried and lives in England with their daughter, Sophie Mol; when her second husband is killed in a car crash, she accepts Chacko's invitation to bring Sophie Mol to Ayemenem.
Chacko, Ammu, the twins and Baby Kochamma, their octogenarian great-aunt, drive to Cochi airport to meet their visitors. The car is stopped on the way by a march of Communist demonstrators, among whom the twins recognise their great friend Velutha, an Untouchable who works as the factory carpenter. The next night, Ammu and Velutha fall passionately in love.
The twins, meanwhile, have made a home from home in a derelict house on the other side of the river, crossing it in an old boat Velutha has repaired for them. Now Sophie Mol insists on going too. The boat capsizes, Sophie Mol is drowned and the twins are still missing when Velutha's father arrives at the kitchen door to tell Ammu's mother that her daughter and his son are having an affair...
But the story weaves backwards and forwards in the arbitrary sequence of memory; any attempt to present it chronologically omits the book's most essential themes - political upheaval, the conflict of ancient prejudice with Western liberalism, the pervading presence of India.
Roy spills images on the page as though frantically searching for something. There are vividly descriptive passages, and there are passages of emotive but meaningless verbiage, crammed with inappropriate metaphors. Acute observation is combined with tweeness, particularly evident when the twins take over the narrative.
The God of Small Things has already been hailed as a masterpiece comparable with Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children and Vikram Seth's A Suitable Boy. It is difficult to believe this is harsh judgment by the highest standards. I admired the spontaneity, disregard of convention and the author's undoubted talent, but I found it pretty hard going.
1998 Amsterdam by Ian McEwan
Reviewed by David Profumo
Almost alone among our leading writers of fiction, Ian McEwan seems uneasy with the demands of the longer novel, and his shorter compositions have seemed the best work (The Child in Time was an exception, but that appeared more than a decade ago). For a novel, his latest volume is certainly short - 178 pages of generously spaced print - but it will remind readers just why this author is so highly valued: his attention to detail, the refusal of virtuosity and a genuine instinct for the exciting make Amsterdam easily his most enjoyable book.
Gathered at the North London funeral of Molly Lane – desirable, talented, dead at 46 of an unspecified, madness-inducing disease – are her unpopular widower George, a plutocratic publisher, and at least three of her lovers. Clive Linley is a successful but conservative composer. Vernon Halliday is the latest editor of The Judge (a venerable broadsheet with dwindling circulation), then there is the Foreign Secretary, Julian Garmony ("He had made a life in the political marketplace with an unexceptional stall of xenophobic and punitive opinions," we are informed, with a reliable curl of the authorial lip).
With its mixture of vitriol and lingering lust, the tone here is deftly set - the cremation as media launch party. One might expect the ensuing morality tale to be caustic at the expense of such latter-day Establishment figures comfortably nurtured during "the Augustan age of rock and roll", but the book is sustained by its maintenance of moral ambiguity.
Vernon and Clive have intimations of mortality and make a euthanasia pact; the maestro frets over his Millennial Symphony, which must set the seal on his genius; while the editor doubles his sports pages "at the expense of Arts and Books" and considers a chess supplement. Then some photographs come to light that show Garmony cross-dressing. Should Vernon publish his expose and destroy the political "enemy", or is Clive correct that this betrays Molly, who took the snaps in private? Bullyboy Lane is clearly hawking the pictures for revenge, but might not the fragrant Rose Garmony, a paediatric surgeon, save her husband from facing the music?
McEwan writes here with unobtrusive panache - he suggests with a rare skill the cross-currents of sympathy and the cold undertow of nemesis, and explores areas of desire and shame that require stealthy rather than flamboyant prose. For all its brevity, this novel is so well done that it has the feel of a much larger work.
1999 Disgrace by JM Coetzee
Reviewed by Justin Cartwright
This is a departure for JM Coetzee from his allegorical style. It is the story of David Lurie, an ageing English professor at a university in Cape Town, who has an affair with a more or less reluctant student and is charged with sexual harassment. He refuses to defend himself and resigns. He leaves Cape Town and goes to stay with his daughter who lives on a smallholding in the Eastern Cape, and does good works with animals as well as selling market produce in a nearby town.
Living on the adjacent property is a black man who helps Lurie's daughter, but also clearly has designs on the whole property. Lurie believes that this man is complicit in his daughter's rape and robbery, of a sort that is not unusual in the country districts. His daughter, however, refuses to take action against him.
Coetzee captures with appalling skill the white dilemma in South Africa: at what point do well-intentioned white people throw in the sponge? Lurie is a man without any expectations of the new South Africa, yet, at the same time, he understands the irresistible tides of change. In his own daughter's predicament, he recognises the outlines of the future - an accommodation with that which he finds alien and even repugnant. The repugnance is not racial, but it is based on the realisation that the nuances of language and culture and literature - he is a Wordsworth and Byron expert - will be lost in this new world, along with many of the signs and symbols that he recognises.
The author also contrasts, with coruscating precision, the politically correct attitudes of Lurie's colleagues at the university, and the fatalistic acceptance by the locals of the assault on his own daughter. The police are unable to bring anybody to justice, despite the fact that the rapists are well known in the area. Coetzee suggests that these people see the violence as a necessary form of spiritual and material redistribution. His daughter must either leave the area or accept the new realities. When she opts for the second, including pregnancy resulting from the rape, Lurie is profoundly shaken. This is the dark heart of the novel.
The story becomes darker still: at the animal sanctuary, Lurie passes most of his days helping destroy stray dogs and remove them to the incinerator. This small service, meaningless in relation to what is going on all around, is presented as an inchoate desire to do good.
It is far from clear where Coetzee stands on this kind of reflex response.
Disgrace is an uncomfortable book from a very singular mind equipped with a distinctive voice. I would guess that in its bleak realism it is the product of Coetzee's deep unease about the dangerous superficiality of the philosophies underlying the new South Africa; I would also guess that Coetzee was not prepared to risk misinterpretation by clothing his unease in his more familiar allegory.
2000 The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood
Reviewed by Allison Pearson
In her high-school graduation yearbook, the young Margaret Atwood declared an ambition: "to write the Great Canadian Novel". At the time, it wasn't that daring a boast. The Great Canadian Novel was probably somewhere up there with The Best Bolivian Cheese or The Pick of Slovakian Lingerie. But Atwood helped to change all that. Through works as original as Cat's Eye (1988), The Robber Bride (1994) and Alias Grace (shortlisted in 1997 for both the Booker and Orange prizes), she pulled her country up the literary rankings to a point where the first team - Atwood, Alice Munro, Carol Shields - could hold its own against any national side. After more than 30 years at the wordface, though, Atwood's teenage goal has remained unfulfilled. In her new book, you can feel her straining to put that right. The Blind Assassin is not just a shot at The Great Canadian Novel but an all-out assault.
It is certainly big enough. Over 520 pages, the book tells the story of the Chase sisters, Iris and Laura. The girls grow up in the 1920s, daughters of a button dynasty in the Canadian town of Port Ticonderoga; they are raised mainly by Reenie, the maid, after their mother dies during childbirth and their father returns from the trenches minus a leg and a faith. We learn a lot about the manners and mores of the period, and a good deal about buttons in particular. A writer should be able to forge art out of manufacturing - witness Philip Roth's sleight of hand with gloves in American Pastoral; instead Atwood makes the business of fiction feel like heavy industry. In the Acknowledgments she credits a squad of three researchers. To have enlisted them would seem a suspect practice for a novelist: if you don't filter the material at source yourself, how are you going to avoid ending up with sludge?
Still, Iris and Laura are enough to snag our interest. They remind you of other literary sisters - Jane Austen's Dashwoods and the Schlegels in Forster's Howards End. Iris is Elinor/Margaret - elder, more cautious, and obliged to make a prudent match to steady the family fortunes; Laura is Marianne/Helen, all poetical notions and exhausting selflessness. As often happens, sense ends up paying for sensibility - taking the rap and none of the credit. For her pains, Iris even gets saddled with a cartoon of a husband: Richard, an industrialist who has a taste for appeasement and young girls. Richard does not actually have the words Capitalist Cad tattooed on his forehead, but otherwise he is drawn with indolent disdain.
How unlike Alex Thomas, a mysterious orphan (has there ever been an orphan in fiction who dares to be dull?). During the Depression, Alex is believed to have started a fire at the button factory, but he has already created enough sparks among the Chase sisters for them to hide this Bolshevik agitator in the attic and then carry a torch for him the rest of their days. In Laura's case that is not long: at the age of 25, she drives off a bridge, apparently leaving behind a novel, The Blind Assassin. A mix of sex and science fiction, it wins Laura a cult following of the highly strung Sylvia Plath variety, which casts Iris as the Olwyn Hughes figure - caretaker, ogre, spoilsport. Atwood's epic of the same name cuts between the elderly Iris, who recalls the family's grim history, and extracts from the sci-fi book in the shape of a male fugitive telling stories about Planet Zycron to a high-born young woman who conducts an affair with him in various seedy bedsits - Alex and Laura, or so we believe.
Confused? You should be. Atwood has always been good at marrying popular and literary genres, but The Blind Assassin feels like a shotgun wedding - the social history reluctantly holds hands with the melodrama and the love story is far too fine to get into bed with the sci-fi junk. Alex's idea of post-coital relaxation is to spin stories to his mistress about Sakiel-Norn, a class-riven city where the hedonistic Snilfards rule and the serfs are known as Ygnirods. Poor sweetheart, she'd probably prefer a cigarette. I'm sure there are numerous parallels between the plight of sacrificial virgins in Sakiel-Norn and women in early 20th-century Canada, but few readers will be awake to count them. At times, the author herself - usually the most alert and beady of writers - appears to be sleepwalking. Forty pages before the end, she even allows Iris to admit, "I've failed to convey Richard in any rounded sense." Meanwhile, Iris's daughter - surely a useful character - is mislaid like a handkerchief. Sections are linked with such cliffhangers as "Anyway, where was I?" And when the novel's great twist - the true identity of the author of The Blind Assassin - is revealed, Iris wearily says, "You must have known that for some time." Indeed.
It is as though, having come up with architectural plans for the Great Canadian Novel, Atwood had forgotten to put in heat and light. When she does switch on the electricity - in the furtive, snatched love scenes - you jump at the reminder of her talent. Removing his mistress's girdle, Alex says, is "like peeling the skin off a seal". We see him looking at her "lying on the bed in a long sinuous fishtail of white cotton". The obsessive, famished feeling the pair share is the best thing in the book and, like all grand passions, it crowds out everything else. Funny to think that inside the Great Canadian Novel is a small love story crying to get out.
2001 True History of the Kelly Gang by Peter Carey
Reviewed by Matthew Kneale
At this important time for Australia, a time of much national self-examination, Peter Carey has produced a novel that looks at one of the iconic figures from the country's past. Taking on a well-known subject can be a risk for a writer, but in this case the risk has paid off handsomely. This is a powerful, well-crafted novel, which is marked by a number of new departures for the author.
This is especially true of the style. The story is told by Ned Kelly himself in a rich but ungrammatical language, a verbal flow short on full stops and commas, in which the word "adjectival" is substituted for frequent obscenities. The voice convinces from the opening paragraph, and gives the novel a leanness, a toughness to the end. It helps the book to control the strong emotions it contains. Here is Kelly's first visit to the police, as a child with his mother:
When we was finally permitted entry all my attention were taken not by the blazing fire but by a huge red jowled creature the Englishman was sat behind the desk. I knew not his name only that he were the most powerful man I ever saw and he might destroy my mother if he so desired. Approach says he as if he was an altar.
Kelly is born into a brutal world - his parents are Irish ex-convicts trying to scratch a living from the land - and at times this is described with a cruel humour. When Kelly is 15, his mother apprentices him to a local bushranger in the belief that this will make her rich. Kelly's first experience of his new craft is to hold the horses during a farcical stagecoach robbery: the driver is caustically unimpressed, the passengers are poor farmers without a penny to their names, and all Kelly wins for his trouble is some glass marbles taken from a Chinese trader. His mother never does see a return on her investment.
As much as it can be funny, though, the novel has an underlying sadness. Kelly and his family seem doomed from the start, for all their fighting spirit. His childhood is haunted by his father's transvestism - later cast into doubt - and by his own role in causing his father's death. His mother's efforts at farming and her wild schemes to get rich come to naught. Having escaped his criminal apprenticeship, Kelly - at least by his own account - strives to be an honest citizen, but is constantly thwarted. He does not rebel so much as drift back into bushranging after falling out with his one friend among the police. He and his tiny gang win sympathy from poor farmers - especially his fellow Irishmen - who have suffered injustice at the hands of the colony's English rulers: a clique of men who parcel out wealth among themselves, supported by a sadistic police force. Yet nobody offers the gang real help. Kelly is no revolutionary, and he never poses a threat to the colonial regime; he merely infuriates it. Even his bullet-proof armour has about it a sense of hopeless bravado.
While the injustices of the era are passionately recounted, there is never a sense of sermonising. The novel achieves something altogether more worthwhile: to bring a peculiar and often violent past world to life, and, in the process, cast a little new light on modern Australia. English readers of this book will learn about Ned Kelly; they may also understand why they find themselves regarded, at times, with a certain wariness when visiting Sydney or Melbourne. Peter Carey has produced some very fine novels before now, but this, I would say, is his finest.
2002 Life of Pi by Yann Martel
Reviewed by Toby Clements
This novel comes with quite a claim: that it will make you believe in God. It is hard to see how a story of survival at sea will achieve this trick, but it is not for me, nor anyone else, to suggest that a story involving a lifeboat, a small Indian boy named after a Parisian swimming pool and a 450 lb Bengal tiger is any more or less inspiring than any other story. Daniel's Old Testament run-in with the lions springs to mind as a parallel. There are many paths to God, after all.
Life of Pi never really comes alive in the emotional sense. It is more a novel of proposition and conjecture, a series of narrative questions and solutions. You discover the reason for this only in the last few pages, when Pi offers an alternative explanation to up-end your assumptions. A cloud covers the sun and there is the possibility of a darkness so complete as to be absolutely nihilistic.
Despite this, Life of Pi is a hilarious novel, full of clever tricks, amusing asides and grand originality. Its subtext exists in that delightful area between the possible and the fantastical, and its tone reminded me of Italo Calvino's Our Ancestors. As to whether it makes you believe in God - well, miracles can happen, so why not to you?
Read the full review here
2003 Vernon God Little by DBC Pierre
Reviewed by Sam Leith
The subtitle to D B C Pierre's smart, hip first novel is irritatingly pretentious: "a twenty-first century comedy in the presence of death". It might equally well be described as a 21st-century marketing proposition in the presence of J D Salinger.
That's not to say that this - saturated in the influence of The Catcher in the Rye though it is - is a bad book. A bumptious black comedy narrated by the teenage survivor of a white-trash high-school massacre, Vernon God Little has a ferocious energy and abundant wit. But if, as I suspect, his publishers believe they have found a new Salinger, they are wrong.
Read the full review here
2004 The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst
Reviewed by Geoff Dyer
Hollinghurst is as infatuated by wealth and elegance as F Scott Fitzgerald; a first frisson of unease comes when Leo turns up at the house. Gerald answers the door, summons Nick and stands back "to see if there was going to be any kind of trouble". Gerald then retires to the kitchen, where he is overheard explaining that the visitor is "'some pal of Nick's...'" and a few moments later, "'No, black chappie.'" Nick and Leo are still at the door when a cab pulls up. "It stopped just in front of them, and the driver clawed round through his open window to release the rear door. When the passenger (who Nick knew was Lady Partridge) didn't emerge, a very rare thing happened and the cabbie got out of the cab and yanked the door open himself, standing aside with a flourish which she acknowledged dryly as she stepped out." Nick politely introduces Lady Partridge to Leo: "She smiled and said, 'How do you do?' in an extraordinarily cordial tone, in which none the less something final was conveyed - the certainty that they would never speak again."
I quote at length - though not at the length I would like; the temptation is to go on quoting paragraph after wonderful paragraph - because this little incident reveals many of the qualities that make this such a magnificent novel. Plenty of English writers can come up with smart turns of phrase and lines of occasional beauty, but Hollinghurst's are the product, always, of precision and patience of observation.
He is living proof that the vaulting claims made by [Henry James] on behalf of the novel - "the force and beauty of its process" - still hold good today.
Read the full review here
2005 The Sea by John Banville
Reviewed by Lewis Jones
With his fastidious wit and exquisite style, John Banville is the heir to Nabokov. His early novels were about scientists - Copernicus, Kepler and Newton - and were superbly accomplished, but he really hit his stride with The Book of Evidence (1989), which was about a criminal aesthete, and which grew into a trilogy with Ghosts (1993) and Athena (1995). In The Untouchable (1997), he brilliantly translated this dynamic into a fictional autobiography of Anthony Blunt. He returns to it in The Sea, his best novel so far.
It has been said of the Irish by some English person (probably one invented by an Irishman) that we gave them a language and they taught us how to use it. This was true of Sheridan, Wilde, Shaw, Joyce and Beckett, and it is true, now, of Banville.
Read the full review here
2006 Kiran Desai The Inheritance of Loss
Read The Telegraph's report on Desai's win here
2007 The Gathering by Anne Enright
Reviewed by Elena Seymenliyska
What could be more Irish than a wake? How about the wake of a man called Liam Hegarty who died with stones in his pockets, liked a drink, came from a family of 12 and was interfered with as a child? That is the outline of Anne Enright's fourth novel. It might be unfair to put it so bluntly, but it is more painless than reading The Gathering.
It's not so much the story that's the problem as its concentrated Irishness, a state of being that surely doesn't need more examination.
Read the full review here
2008 The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga
Reviewed by Peter Robins
A sign, for the people who notice that sort of thing, of just how thrusting India's economy has become: it can now be embodied in fiction by a desperate killer.
The White Tiger is a furious and brutally effective counterblast to smug "India is shining'' rhetoric - that particular slogan is never mentioned, but the election it lost is crucial to the plot - which also directs hard, well-aimed kicks at hypocrisy and thuggery on the traditionalist Indian Left. It is certain of its mission, and pursues it with an undeviating determination you wouldn't expect in a first novel. It reads at a tremendous clip. Its caricatures are sharply and confidently drawn. It is full of barbed wit, if not - and not trying to be, so far as I can tell - actually funny. It won't win any prizes for subtlety. But it hasn't been nominated for one of those.
Read the full review here
2009 Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
Reviewed by Claudia FitzHerbert
It begins when we are children, the desire to colour in the bold outlines of the Tudors. We know so much - the clothes, jewels, buildings, battles, the sudden savagery of royal justice - and yet so little about the thoughts and feelings of even the literate players. Every generation throws up its own colourists, hacks who provide the lurid scenes their trade demands. Their books sell, but never last.
Every now and then an artist of another mettle is drawn into the Tudor fray, and turns everything we knew on its head. Characters are no longer fixed, conviction becomes evasion, courage a moveable feast. In Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel rewrites the history of England from 1527 to 1535 with Thomas Cromwell as the hero.
Read the full review here
2010 The Finkler Question by Howard Jacobson
Reviewed by James Walton
For some writers a thorough investigation of the situation of British Jews today might do as the subject for a single book. In The Finkler Question it's combined with his characteristically unsparing - but not unkindly - ruminations on love, ageing, death and grief. He also manages his customary - but not easy - trick of fusing all of the above with genuine comedy. And sentence by sentence, there are few writers who exhibit the same unawed respect for language or such a relentless commitment to re-examining even the most seemingly unobjectionable of received wisdoms.
No wonder that, as with most of Jacobson's novels, you finish The Finkler Question feeling both faintly exhausted and richly entertained.
Read the full review here
2011 The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes
Reviewed by Anita Brookner
In this short but compelling novel Julian Barnes tracks the origin of one particular memory through a long and apparently uneventful life towards an explanation that leaves traces of unease that are difficult to dismiss.
His reputation will surely be enhanced by this book. Do not be misled by its brevity. Its mystery is as deeply embedded as the most archaic of memories.
Read the full review here
2012 Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel
Reviewed by Bettany Hughes
The story of the world is littered with the corpses of clever, charismatic women. To make your mark pretty consistently over the past 3,500 years, as a female of the species you have had to be extra special; and being special in historical times usually led to the cold embrace of an early grave.
Having conjured Henry’s brainy bovver-boy Thomas Cromwell from his own tomb in her Man Booker winner Wolf Hall (2009), Mantel now does the same service for Anne Boleyn. And just as Wolf Hall tracked Henry VIII’s waning interest in Katherine of Aragon, we now realise that spiky Anne “all elbows” is running out of time. Henry has spotted pale Jane Seymour and wears the moronic expression of a stunned veal-calf, “knocked on the head by the butcher” as Mantel’s Cromwell puts it. Anne has become another staging post in Henry’s ramble through the carnal, political and sacral corruptions of absolute power.
In Bring Up the Bodies, all Henry’s skulduggery, the desperation of his framed traitors and his women’s privations are experienced through the prism of Cromwell’s consciousness. This is a compelling plot device but also an interesting historical one. Historians have been described as frustrated novelists – we select key characters, become mildly obsessed by them and follow their story through the evidence they leave behind. Mantel tells us up front – by seeing with Cromwell’s eyes, hearing with his ears – that this is what she will be doing.
Read the full review here
2013 The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton
Reviewed by Lucy Daniel
Just as the market seems saturated with Victoriana, along comes Catton and proves herself as entertaining a mistress of plot and pacing as Sarah Waters. Her novel makes ample use of those accoutrements of an old-fashioned plot that surely partly explain what motivates so many of our brightest writers today to set their fiction in the past: the shiftiness of signatures and handwriting, eavesdropping and assignations, conspiracies and secrets, people from one’s past who turn up and expose you, purloined letters and delayed communications, the absence of permanent availability, that seem defunct in a modern setting.
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