Category: The New York Times Book Review

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All Souls Rising

It was an art critic who coined the term “magic realism,” to describe a new wave of painting in 1920s Ger­many. The work departed from the moody Expressionism of the day, emphasizing material reality even as it unlocked an elusive otherworldliness in the arrangement of everyday objects. Sometimes, though, the fantastic rubbed elbows with the real: in one painting, a fat general nonchalantly shares a table with headless men in tuxedos.

In literature as in art, the genre has been dominated by men. So critics devised the label “magical feminism” just for Isabel Allende’s multigenerational family chronicles featuring strong-willed women, usually entangled in steamy love affairs against a backdrop of war and political upheaval. These elements are all present in her new novel, “Island Beneath the Sea,” but its approach is traditional. Where, you wonder, are the headless men — or, in Allende’s case, headless women? Where is the magical realism?

Continue reading in the Sunday New York Times Book Review.

Read an excerpt from the book here.

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ALL Book Reviews The New York Times Book Review

Song of India

Amit Chaudhuri’s new novel, a comedy of manners set in 1980s India, centers on the teenage scion of a corporate family who neither dresses nor acts the part. Read my review of The Immortals in The New York Times Book Review. And read an excerpt from the book here.

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ALL Book Reviews The New York Times Book Review

Sleeping With the Enemy

The narrator of “The Last War” has received an anonymous letter accusing her war correspondent husband of infidelity. So, unfortunately, did the book’s author. It speaks to Ana Menéndez’s maturity — as a woman and a writer — that her novel doesn’t go where it might have. It doesn’t constitute literary payback. Continue reading my review of The Last War by Ana Menendez in The New York Times Book Review.

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Vulnerable in Morocco

Laila Lalami, a Moroccan- American writer who in her late 20s crossed a literary border into the landscape of English prose, begins her first novel with lines from the Cuban-American poet Gustavo Pérez Firmat: “The fact that I / am writing to you / in English / already falsifies what I wanted to tell you.” There’s a disarming fatalism about this epigraph, with its suggestion that the ensuing words might be counterfeit because they are coined neither in Lalami’s first language (Arabic) nor her second (French).

Lalami has said she chooses to write in English partly because she wants to speak directly to Americans, who read few translated books but urgently need authentic maps to those parts of the world where inequality has electroshocked the terrorist id into being. Read my review of her debut novel, Secret Son, in The New York Times Book Review.

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Exile’s Return

The subtitle of “Honeymoon in Tehran,” an engaging new book from the author of “Lipstick Jihad,” promises “two years of love and danger in Iran.” But while Azadeh Moaveni does indeed deliver details of her romance with the son of an Iranian textile tycoon, there’s another, more intriguing relationship at the core of this memoir.

It’s embodied by a certain Mr. X, the intelligence agent the Islamic Republic has assigned to shadow Moaveni’s movements as a reporter for Time magazine.

Continue reading my review of Honeymoon in Tehran in The New York Times Book Review.