Turnabout is fair play. The woman mythologized as an enigmatic Indian maiden by Romanian scholar Mircea Eliade in Bengal Nights (see below) offers her own novelized version of their supposed torrid affair. Imagine making a trip to Europe as an adult and finding people who know intimate details of your teenaged years. Such was the experience of Devi (who died in 1990, an accomplished poet and scholar) when she found that Eliade, a renowned scholar of religion, had written a ``semi-autobiographical'' (he uses her actual first name in his story) account of his time with her family in Calcutta in the 1930s. When she heard that the young man with whom she had first felt the pangs of passion—but, in her account, had next to no physical contact—had portrayed their relationship as a wild, sexual affair that ended when her staunchly traditional family learned of it, her pleasant memories of the events turned to anger: This man ``whose memory I preserved in the depth of heart as a sacred trust...has been selling my flesh for a price.'' Now, after Eliade's account has appeared in several languages and on film, Devi uses fiction to tell her side of the story. In lucid prose that calls into question the concepts of time, memory, and the adventuring spirit of the colonizing West, she undercuts Eliade's portrait of a curious, naãve girl by showing just how cosmopolitan and precocious she was. After all, her first book of poems was published, with a preface by Rabindranath Tagore, when she was 16. She also denies that their affair led to beatings and disgrace. An engaging story from a talented and skillful poet, philosopher, and storyteller having her say about the tangled threads of passion and memory.
Pub Date: April 15, 1994
ISBN: 0-226-14363-5
Page Count: 264
Publisher: Univ. of Chicago
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1994
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
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