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From Publishers Weekly
Ali's 2003 debut, Brick Lane, was a brilliant family saga told largely from within a Bangladeshi woman's apartment on London's ramshackle East End. Ali, who was born in Dhaka and grew up in London, sets her sophomore effort in a similarly struggling community, the rural Alentejo region of Portugal, where cork prices are falling, the region is still healing after the brutal Salazar regime and the locals don't quite care to cater to tourists. But where Brick Lane was quietly symphonic, this blues-like novel is more of a dirge: João, in old age, comes upon his old friend (and sometime lover), Rui, hanging from a tree, his Communist dreams dashed; the English Potts family scrapes by as indolents-in-exile; the writer Stanton, also British, works away on a second-rate literary biography; tavern-keeper Vasco sadly and silently reminisces about his marriage to an American, Lili; and young Teresa is preparing to leave the village for an uncertain future "outside." The simultaneous sense of stasis and great change is Ali's forte, and her characters' perceptions are sharp. But when anyone other than the Brits speak, it's as if Ali is trying to ventriloquize an incompletely acquired dialect. The characters' lives generate little tension, much like the pinball machine in Vasco's cafe that Stanton plays badly. (June 20)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Booklist
Provincial Portugal--specifically, the region called Alentejo--provides a rustic but atmospherically rich setting for a cycle of stories by the Bangladeshi-born author of the critically celebrated novel Brick Lane (2003). Are these nine stories better seen as chapters in a loosely constructed novel? Actual classification is incidental as Ali follows a group of individuals who call the village of Mamarrosa home, whether permanently or temporarily. Her sensitivity to tender natures leaves her an astonishing inhabiter of the psychology of a variety of characters who come within Mamarrosa's orbit, including an English writer who has stationed himself there, the local tavern owner, and a female tourist bringing her problems from home. Many characters recur from one story, or "chapter," to the next, providing a strong connective thread in addition to their common setting. A master of concision and suggestion, the author says volumes about characters and situations by what she does not say. It does indeed take a village--in this case, to show the fundamental universality of all human predicaments. Brad Hooper
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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