For the Boston Review, I write on novels by Neel Mukherjee and V.S. Naipaul and one odd winter in New Delhi that left me unhoused in my own skin. I consider whether, “in the curved space-time of global history, migration can crack open wormholes to freedom from old rigidities and entitlements,” including the barriers of gender, class and caste.
The New York Times Book Review
MUSIC OF THE GHOSTS
By Vaddey Ratner
324 pp. Touchstone. $26.
Vaddey Ratner calls each of the three parts of her tenaciously melodic second novel a movement. And indeed this story of an orphaned Cambodian refugee’s return to her homeland does have a symphony’s elevating effect on emotion. Ratner stirs feeling — sorrow, sympathy, pleasure — through language so ethereal in the face of dislocation and loss that its beauty can only be described as stubborn.
Continue reading in the NYTBR.
An essay for The Virginia Quarterly Review: “For both artist and migrant, ships are symbols of the universal. A slave, an indentured servant, a tourist, a seaman, a refugee obviously each inhabit a ship distinctly, but aboard, each is ultimately at the mercy of the sea. I share Locke’s instinct for seeking comrades in the hull’s curve.”
In an outburst toward the novel’s end, when one fellow disappears along with all traces that he existed, the power-obsessed chairman name-drops Orwell, an unsubtle clue to Finch’s ambitions as a political satirist and his interest in language as a political tool. But aspects of his novel bear more resemblance to the “Big Brother” of global reality television than to “1984.”
Continue reading my review in The New York Times Book Review.
Pink Sari Revolution, by Amana Fontanella-Khan, tells the story of the Gulabi Gang.
The gang’s story—of poverty-stricken, unlettered women standing up for themselves, struggling against centuries-old misogyny—inspires. “Hope is a very big thing,” one elderly member says. “Sampat gave it to us every time she came to the village.” Still, it needs to be asked how truly revolutionary the Gulabi Gang is—or can be—and the author doesn’t step back from storytelling to do so. In her account of a widow horrifically mistreated, then evicted, by her in-laws, she misses opportunities to explore the gang’s limits and thus risks overstating their impact. Read my review in the Summer 2013 Ms. Magazine.
