Review of Turning Back Time by Shravya Gunipudi



“Death is a terrible curse”- which the author highlights in the novel giving hints from stories of four inmates at an old age home where the central character, Alia worked on part time. The author presents the story in an “engineered” manner depicting every social evil and the psychological aspect of humans in connection to social conventions, family planning, rural and urban life.Though each story ends with the death of the character, it actually doesn’t end the novel, rather it asks the readers to think and find out where we lag behind in today’s world. And what joins each story is the element of “love.” We all fall in love, whether successful or unsuccessful, it takes us through an experience of lifetime.





 


Raman’s story, which tells us about his father cheating on his mother, and Raman and his brother choosing the wrong woman to lose their virginity and at an age when they would be identified as children. Later, they corrected themselves and lead a normal life until Raman moves to the city and events occur one after the another, giving a clear picture of what really happens in today’s society.

Hema’s story of complete misfortune, right from her birth to marriage and the lives of her daughters, still does take place in the Indian society. Thus, the proverb “History repeats itself” is after all true. Hema’s story mainly deals with gender discrimination.

Girish’s story of unsuccessful love tells us, “love” is still a taboo in Indian society. His mother died of hearing of “love marriage” shows the depth to which the taboo is rooted. What we dream as children are just stories of fairy tales and it can only be a reality if people come out of their narrow minds. Love can never be evil and arrange marriages will not always end up to be the most successful one every time.

Sita’s story deals with sexual abuse within the family and only perverts like her uncle can commit such unexpected sin. This can also be a lacuna on part of the modern Indian society where girls in south Indian states (among Hindu community) are married to their maternal uncles, which is accepted among the community but if we think with the mind of a civilized culture, that would just be considered a case of sodomy, rather than a pious relation. There is no point on raising finger at girls and accusing them of having illegitimate relations when the society doesn’t look into the matter to find the truth. 

As the story ends, the author also highlights that nothing stays forever. Alia can cherish her moments with Mayank only till the time they are alive, because “forever” ends with none. 

About the technicalities, the novel could have been presented in much better way but whatever the case maybe it has gripped me from beginning to end and this is what most novels fails to achieve. A good novel must have a strong hook and “Turning Back Time” had it.


Review by The Bibliophili Team

Review of One Indian Girl by Chetan Bhagat



Chetan Bhagat’s One Indian Girl is a polarising book. Reviewers belong to one of two camps: they either want to burn it or they gesticulate wildly at the sales figures, mumbling about “publishing revolution” and a “new breed of readers”. Yes, Chetan Bhagat did once revolutionise the Indian (English) publishing industry by speaking for the aspirations of a generation. But this is not that book. This book is being sold by a brand, and people buy brands for all sorts of complex reasons. Lakhs and lakhs of fans will queue up for tickets for the first-day first-show of a superstar’s film. Is the film any good? Maybe, maybe not. They are there because it is their superstar’s film, not particularly because they think it is good.! Such is the case with Bhagat’s book: sales numbers mean very little when a book is given away for Res. 1 in the first week of its launch.
The plot of One Indian Girl reads like a colour-by-numbers exercise book on Bollywood scriptwriting — Punjabi wedding? Check. Comedy sequence with bumbling aunties? Check. Sex on exotic beach? Check. Locations in New York, Hong Kong and London? Check, check, check. The central premise of the novel is no less formulaic: An immensely successful woman has to choose between three brainless-but-adorable men. One is a self-confessed bore and cricket and Bollywood enthusiast. The second is a Bengali communist with an unfortunate penchant for the word “baby”. The third is a highly desirable but entirely inappropriate older man. But why would Radhika Mehta — successful, stylish, kind — want to choose any of these three moronic men is the question. The only reason she could have for falling in love with them is that she is so insecure that she simply cannot believe that they chose her. Women with low self-esteem issues do strange things, and I’m sure there are lots of high-achieving women out there heartbroken about men who do not deserve their attention. Who are we to dictate what Radhika should feel or not feel.The problem is that Bhagat never tells us why she is so hung up about men so unworthy of her. It’s as though he assumes that it is completely normal for intelligent and successful women to be besotted with jerks.
Let’s be honest. One Indian Girl never set off to be a feminist book. Bhagat’s politics are probably closer to that of his character Brijesh Gulati: “I think all human beings should have equal rights. It’s not men versus women, it’s human versus human. Feminist is a wrong term. It should be humanist.” After her moment of self-actualisation, that’s the conclusion Bhagat’s protagonist, Radhika, also makes. “Everything doesn’t need hi-fi labels like feminism. Just logic,” she says, and they skip away into the sunset, content with their mutual reasonableness, dismissing a 300-year-old fierce history of a socio-political movement. Is every story from a woman’s perspective obligated to be a feminist one? I don’t think so. But the problem is that somewhere down the line, Bhagat lost the plot and instead of writing a book from the “point of view of a girl” it became a book on “the problems women face”.
Props to Bhagat for trying to take on a multitude of issues — the constant undermining of a woman’s success, women being forced to choose between work and home, the obsession over fair skin — all very relevant. These sections are perhaps the redeeming bits — the reason several readers have stepped up to say they relate to Radhika’s story. But the problem is, Bhagat, by trying to include the voice of each of the hundred women he interviewed, ends up with cacophony. All the evils of the world are mounted on the shoulders of the mother — she is obsessed about marriage, ashamed of her daughter’s skin colour, and is the voice of a society that constantly undermines a woman’s success. Radhika’s sister gets an equally raw deal: she is self-centred, cares only about her looks, and has no life outside her marriage.
It’s not just the women Bhagat is unkind to. Radhika’s lovers sound like cardboard cut-outs that exist just to make Radhika’s life difficult. One man asks her to choose kids over career, the other asks her to choose career over kids. They are perfect inverted mirror images of each other. Bhagat tries too hard to evoke sympathy and ends up having the opposite effect: “See, see! This is what women face! Care about this! Now!”!! It feels like you’re being hit on the head with a rubber hammer emblazoned with the words “WOMEN’S PROBLEMS” underlined four times.
But there is a golden core. It is essentially the story of one woman’s battle against insecurity, an insecurity that stems from growing up in an unequal society. Only when Radhika gives up her critical inner-voice — her “mini me” that constantly tells her what a woman should or should not do does she find happiness. Though this message is worthy, you will have to peel away layers of nonsense to get to it. Radhika spends far too much time judging other women and grovelling for attention and validation from her lovers and male bosses. At one point, she offers to quit her job to assuage her boyfriend’s ego.“I wanted him. I was ready to be his girl, just the way he wanted me to be,” she says. She stalks her exes with the tenacity with which Tamil heroes stalk heroines. Then, after her moment of self-actualisation, she goes on a round-the-world trip and achieves a zen-like state of calm. But what does Radhika then do? She has a romantic coffee date with the “humanist not feminist” Brijesh Gulati she rejected two months ago. If Bhagat was indeed trying to write a feminist book, is this the solution he offers? Date a humanist?
Radhika lives in a world populated entirely by men, except for her mother and sister. Other female characters are a secretary or a flight attendant. At no point do these characters have a meaningful conversation about anything. Just as responsible, feminist men are absent from Bhagat’s world, so are responsible, feminist women.
One Indian Girl was supposed to be representative of the modern Indian woman. Instead, it is about an immensely unlikeable woman who has a lifestyle that can best be described as aspirational. At least the title was right. The book is literally about one Indian girl.

Review by Chitralekha Manohar

Review of Life After Life by Kate Atkinson


"Time is like a palimpsest," Ursula Todd tells her former psychiatrist, comparing her life to a page that's been scraped, but with traces of the old writing blending with the new.

She ought to know.


In Kate Atkinson's compelling new novel, "Life After Life," the baby girl who might have been Ursula Todd is born dead on a snowy 1910 day in England, her umbilical cord wrapped around her neck. But then she is born again, and acquires her name. She drowns in the ocean as a little girl, but is born again on that snowy day in 1910, only to fall to death as a girl trying to rescue a doll her older brother tossed out the window. More rebirths, longer lives, more deaths.


"Life After Life" is the second literary novel I've read this year that reflects gaming structures, consciously or otherwise, in depicting the joys, vicissitudes and choices of a life. With its second-person narration, Mohsin Hamid's "How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia" reads like a text-based role-playing game. In "Life After Life," Ursula keeps re-spawning after each death, eventually gaining some ability to return to life at a key checkpoint and make a different choice.


As her sequential lives pile up, Ursula lives uneasily with the powerful déjà vu that prompts her into actions inexplicable to others: As a girl, she knocks the family's Irish maid down the stairs, breaking her arm. Only Ursula knows she's saving the maid from a trip that will lead to death from influenza. "The past was a jumble in her mind."


While different choice points lead to some dramatically different outcomes, Ursula's personality is fairly consistent. Loves her father, Hugh. It's complicated with her mother, Sylvie. Adores her younger brother, Teddy. Forms strong friendships with sister Pamela, childhood neighbor Millie.


With men, it's more than complicated. "She seemed instead to be a magnet for unsavory types . . . and worried that they could read something in her that she couldn't read herself." In different incarnations, she's raped and becomes pregnant, marries and is physically abused. She's victimized but no eternal victim, and doesn't make the same mistake twice.


Her lives through the interwar years and the Blitz of London demonstrate how narrow women's roles and options could be then, but smart, pretty and determined, she makes her way. Once she imagines her headstone reading, "Ursula Beresford Todd, stalwart to the last." That would fit her, possibly in a way nobler than she realizes.


In the notes for her novel (which contain spoilers), Atkinson writes that it is about "not just the reality of being English but also what we are in our own imagination." Part of her motivation, she writes, is bearing witness to life in England during World War II. Ursula's experiences as an air raid warden in London go on my favorite shelf with Connie Willis' "Blackout" for their depictions of the everyday heroism of the English during the bombing of London.


Some of Ursula's roads lead to Germany. Through Ursula, Atkinson engages one of the great counterfactual what-ifs: Could someone stop Hitler before he destroyed Europe?


I tallied 17 lives for Ursula, but Atkinson handles these transitions so deftly I might have miscounted. Why does Ursula keep coming back? To kill Hitler? To save a loved one? To grow in empathy for the difficulty of lives lived anywhere? All of the above? Atkinson tantalizes but does not state outright. Playfully, she also threads the novel with grace notes about choices and time, such as allowing Ursula to buy the yellow party dress in one life that she denied herself in an earlier one.




Review by Jim Higgins

Review of Do Not Say We Have Nothing by Modeleine Thien

If you are walking straight into a headwind, it is a triumph simply to keep yourself upright. Wittgenstein wrote about this with what looks like staggering foresight in 1930: that in a time of cultural impoverishment, “the strength of the individual is wasted through the overcoming of opposing forces & frictional resistances.”
This pointless dissipation of energy and talent perfectly describes the horrors that befell classical musicians during the Chinese Cultural Revolution. The music they loved was forbidden. Their instruments were destroyed. They were tortured and humiliated, accused of treachery and vanity and dispatched to work in the farms and factories of the hinterlands. Their virtues — their virtuosity — were brutally recast as moral weaknesses and a national threat.
The most they could do was protect whatever frail, ghostly sense of identity they still had. It drove many to suicide. And it wasn’t just artists who suffered. Keeping two sets of selves was unbearable for millions. As one of the characters rhetorically asks in “Do Not Say We Have Nothing,” the new novel by Madeleine Thien: “What was misfortune but the quality of existing as something, or someone else, inside?”
“Do Not Say We Have Nothing,” shortlisted this year for the Man Booker Prize, is Ms. Thien’s third novel. It is a beautiful, sorrowful work. The book impresses in many senses: It stamps the memory with an afterimage; it successfully explores larger ideas about politics and art (the mind is never still while reading it); it has the satisfying, epic sweep of a 19th-century Russian novel, spanning three generations and lapping up against the shores of two continents.
To give a sense of just how seductive Ms. Thien’s style is, here are the novel’s opening lines: “In a single year, my father left us twice. The first time, to end his marriage, and the second, when he took his own life.”


Madeleine Thien Credit Gary Doak/Writer Pictures, via Associated Press

And so the story begins: Li-ling, whose English name is Marie, is a Chinese-Canadian mathematician recalling for us the mystery of her father’s sudden departure and suicide when she was 10 years old. The year was 1989, and his death roughly coincided with the massacre in Tiananmen Square, although he was in Hong Kong at the time. (He jumped from a ninth-floor window.) Two months later, Marie and her mother received a letter from a woman in China asking them to provide shelter for her daughter, Ai-ming, who had gotten in trouble during the demonstrations.
Marie and her mother were hardly selected at random. Ai-ming’s father, a composer named Sparrow, mentored Marie’s father, Kai, back in the 1960s, when they were at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music together. Kai had never spoken of this to his daughter. She knew her father had played piano for Mao Zedong, but her home did not even have a piano.
Slowly, Marie pieces together her father’s history and his country’s — through Ai-ming’s stories, through her own research, and (most obliquely) through a series of notebooks found among Kai’s personal effects called the Book of Records, a piecemeal novel that was copied, amended and updated each time it came into the possession of another steward. The radical, forbidden book was passed along in secret, generally to “resistance fighters, spies and dreamers,” always embedded with clues about that particular person’s circumstances and whereabouts.
The larger saga unfurls like silk — and proves similarly resistant to knots, a testament to Ms. Thien’s storytelling skills.
At the novel’s heart are Sparrow, Kai, and Zhuli, a magical triumvirate bound together by their love of classical music and one another. Kai is a tough orphan from the provinces and a gifted pianist. Sparrow, his teacher, is a shy composer. Sparrow’s cousin Zhuli, a teenage girl 10 years his junior, is a violinist and charming life force. “When his cousin played his work,” Ms. Thien writes, “it was as if she sifted the dust away, lost the notes and found the music.”
The background of “Do Not Say We Have Nothing” pulses with music. Ms. Thien has that rare, instinctive sense of what it’s like for a person’s brain to be a hostage to its inner score — the call inside these characters’ heads is always louder than the call of the outside world, most fatally that of the Communist Party — and her observations about Bach and Prokofiev, Shostakovich and Debussy are some of the book’s sweetest pleasures, as are her ruthless critiques of musicians. (Zhuli’s assessment of a gorgeous-but-bloodless fellow violinist: “She played Beethoven as if he had never been alive.”)
But slowly, sentiment begins to shift at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music. Students began writing essays asking, “What good is this music, these empty enchantments, that only entrench the bourgeoisie and isolate the poor?”
Zhuli, Kai and Sparrow each make different choices about how to survive the violent assault on their identities, not one of them happy, all of them worthy of a dirge.
Ms. Thien captures painfully well the depersonalization and numbness of living through the Cultural Revolution, particularly the “day-to-day insincerity” of casual conversation, larded with perfunctory praise for the party and Chairman Mao. (It sounds as if it’s coming from a Communist Twitter bot.) Her depictions of the Red Guard’s brutality are graphic and difficult to read: Zhuli’s parents, property owners, are trussed like chickens, beaten and sent to re-education camps.
The novel culminates, perhaps inevitably, with the protests in Tiananmen Square. It’s a virtuoso stretch of writing, rendered with a blue-flame intensity, blazing and tactile and full of life. Noodle sellers, exhilarated, are giving away food. (Ms. Thien pulled this from the historical record; her novel has endnotes.) A burning mattress “flew in slow motion onto an army truck.” Sparrow crumples under the weight of a heavyset worker who has been pierced by a bullet.
Even before the tanks roll in, the reader is left to wonder if history is simply destined to repeat itself. One father of a student complains to Sparrow: “These kids think it’s all up to them. They have no understanding of fate.”
It’s a possibility Ms. Thien examines throughout the novel: “How time is bent and elastic and repeated. ” But the Book of Records, with its constant emendations, suggests another possibility. “I have this idea that … maybe, a long time ago, the Book of Records was set in a future that hadn’t yet arrived,” Zhuli says.
The implication is that China is still an unfinished work — just like Sparrow’s Symphony No. 3, a thing of true beauty, which he was forced to hide in the roof of his house. There it got lost, as did the man he was supposed to become. Yet years later, he found himself able to compose again. But he couldn’t complete that particular piece. The notes he sought were buried in the past.
Review by Jennifer Senior 




Review of Truevine by Beth Macy


A consummate chronicler of the American South spotlights the extraordinary history of two kidnapped African-American brothers enslaved as a circus sideshow act.
Expanding on her 2001 co-authored article series in the Roanoke Times, journalist Macy (Factory Man: How One Furniture Maker Battled Offshoring, Stayed Local—and Helped Save an American Town, 2014) reconstructs the folkloric yet true story of brothers George and Willie Muse, who, in 1899, at ages 9 and 6, toiled on a sweltering tobacco farm in Virginia. As black albinos bearing golden dreadlocks, the boys were considered “genetic anomalies” yet visually ideal when spied by Candy Shelton, a white bounty hunter scouring the area for “freaks” to enslave in circus sideshow acts. As circus entertainment crested in popularity at the turn of the 20th century, Macy writes, much money was to be made by sideshow managers eager to exploit those with physical abnormalities. Despite being falsely told that their mother had died, the Muse brothers went on to become “among the top tier of sideshow headline grabbers,” internationally known to Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey audiences as “Eko and Iko, the Ecuadorian Savages.” Macy vividly illustrates circus life during the 1920s, and she movingly depicts how the brothers’ protective, determined mother, Harriett, eventually discovered and rescued them almost a decade and a half later. She sued the circus only to have George and Willie (along with little brother Tom) inexplicably return to the big top under Shelton’s management with decidedly mixed results. The story draws on years of diligent, investigative research and personal investment on the author’s behalf, and it features numerous interviews with immediate family, neighbors, distant relatives, Truevine townsfolk, and associated friends, most notably Nancy Saunders, Willie’s fiercely outspoken primary caregiver. Macy absorbed their own individual (and often conflicting) interpretations of the Muse kidnappings, condensing and skillfully braiding them into a sturdy, passionate, and penetrating narrative.
This first-rate journey into human trafficking, slavery, and familial bonding is an engrossing example of spirited, determined reportage.

a Kirkus review

Man Booker Prize shortlist 2016: Hot Milk by Deborah Levy



From Beautiful Mutants (1989), a nightmarish satire of Thatcher’s London, to The Unloved (1994), a murder mystery with a gruelling flashback to the Algerian war of independence, Deborah Levy’s early novels unfolded as fragmentary, perplexing torrents of images, populated by sexual deviants and damp with the blood of 20th-century conflicts, anti-naturalist but not reducible to allegory.
In the 2000s she published no novels; Levy was raising two children. But the market for fiction had changed by the time of her 2011 comeback, Swimming Home. That novel, which turned on an illicit encounter between a poet and his young fan at a French holiday villa, was less opaque than Levy’s previous work. However, the mainstream publishing houses deemed it too literary; it was left to the independent outfit And Other Stories, whereupon it was shortlisted for the 2012 Man Booker Prize. Ironically, thanks to that success, Levy has once again been embraced by an imprint of Penguin Random House.
Hot Milk, her latest novel, is concerned with hypochondria and a troubled mother-daughter relationship. At the level of the sentence, at least, it is her most straightforwardly readable book: you can be confident of knowing what’s happening in a way that wasn’t the case in her earlier work, which was written in defiance of “the slow, dulling imitation of real life”. But while she meets the reader halfway, an elusive quality remains.
The narrator is Sofia, a half-Greek anthropology graduate in her mid-20s who has given up a doctorate to care for her English mother Rose, whose paralysis has baffled various British doctors. Now Rose has remortgaged her Hackney home and Sofia has abandoned her below-minimum-wage job as a barista to spend a month together in arid Andalusia at a private physiotherapy clinic.
Adrift, Sofia compares her dormant doctoral thesis to “an unclaimed suicide”. She doesn’t speak Greek and hasn’t seen her father for 11 years, but keeps his surname; tellingly, Sofia says the “Papa-” prefix is the only part of her name anyone can pronounce. Both mother and daughter spend a lot of time observing each other without seeing. While Sofia has had to be attentive to Rose’s complaints from a young age, we sense that she hasn’t taken into account the sacrifices her mother made in raising her alone.
On the beach, Sofia is drawn to Ingrid from Berlin, whom she initially mistakes for a man after a lavatory cubicle mix-up. The shifting dynamics of this affair (complicated by Ingrid’s American boyfriend and her regular assignations with a riding instructor) are the most propulsive element in the multi-layered, dream-like narrative. Eurozone austerity (figured in unfinished apartment blocks and unemployment) anchors the action in the real world.
Events float by in short snatches, interspersed with creepy paragraphs from the point of view of someone who is spying on “the Greek girl”. At first we think the voice belongs to a philosophy graduate who helps Sofia with a jellyfish sting. Later – more troublingly - we think it might belong to someone she has never met. Whoever it is, they note that, at bedtime, Sofia doesn’t lock the door of the apartment she shares with Rose: “an invitation to hurt her very badly”.
These interludes are among several narrative teases; “Whatever you are waiting for may not arrive,” Sofia says at one point. While Rose calls her daughter “plump and idle and… living off her mother at quite an advanced age”, Sofia, by her own account, is “anti the major plots”: she doesn’t want to be someone’s girlfriend and rejects any prospect of motherhood: “I was flesh thirst desire dust blood lips cracking feet blistered knees skinned hips bruised, but I was so happy not to be napping on a sofa under a blanket with… a baby on my lap.”
There’s an ironic twist to make any hypochondriac shudder, as well as a disturbing late revelation about childhood innocence. But ultimately Hot Milk, like most of Levy’s fiction, is about its uncanny atmosphere. Ingrid takes an axe to a snake on her bathroom floor after a post-coital cold shower with Sofia; she gives Sofia a halterneck top embroidered with the word “beloved”, only for Sofia to see that it actually reads “beheaded”. Once, Sofia deposits Rose’s wheelchair in front of an oncoming lorry.
These bizarre images imprint themselves long after the end of this feverish coming-of-age novel, which confirms the resurgence of its singular author.
Review by Anthony Cummins

Review of Xunaira Javed's novel Incandescence










Title: 4/5
Story: 4/5
Characters: 4/5
Overall: 4/5

Characters:

Alisha- The Protagonist
Anis- Alisha's love(the hero)

Blurb: Today every society strive for the rights of women but still women has to work hard to bring them under focus. Alisha, a burn victim whose dream to set up an office for web development broke into pieces after a sudden fire charred her body. The burns changed her looks completely. Her family supported her every time and fulfilled all her that she ever mentioned. But will the society accept and give her the same respect like other women? Will her long time love take her as his wife even after she lost her beautiful face? Is it true that love is above all other things on Earth? Can Alisha fulfil her dreams anymore?

Summary: Incandescence by Xunaira Javed is a story of Alisha, a young woman who had a long dream to set up website development company that was once shattered by the fire in her office, giving her severe burns. The way the story starts with Alisha's graduation and her lethargic manners like 'throwing the bag on the couch'. The monotony is not out of her daily habit but because of her hard work that yielded to her success. But that doesn't mean she had lost her interest in work. She was ready to step into her professional life and she had made long plans too. What she needed was the degree that would qualify her to start working. Another important highlight of the story is that Anis marries Alisha even after her face was disfigured. Love is always unconditional.

Plot: Alisha is the face of all struggling women in city lives. As a protagonist, she wins over the hearts of the readers by proving herself different from the weak minded females who lose all their hopes and cannot get back to their previous state after they are mentally broken. Alisha is a determined and hardworking women who takes every pain to established her dream. There is nothing that can achieve her dedication than her prolonged dream for success. Though she was afraid to see her own face after surgery, she had enough courage to look at the mirror. Moreover, the love of Anis for Alisha proved strong enough and Anis went against all social taboo and married a burn victim. The story has a well-knit plot and Xunaira has well interpreted the elements of all the five senses throughout the book. She maintained lucidity of the language and a smooth flow of her words. The characters in the story are well developed and the author doesn't lose her focus either from the plot or the central character.

Appreciation: The character of Alisha bridges the gap between able and disables in the society. And Anis taking Alisha as his wife changes the general acceptability the society had framed out.

Verdict: To conclude Incandescence is an interesting, simple, touching and heart-aching story; it can bring tears around the rim of your eyes, make your heart fly high in the blue and colour yourself with the hue of the rainbow.





Review by Uroosa Kashif