Burnt Shadows: A Novel
By Kamila Shamsie
May 2009
$14.00
384 pp
Picador, Trade Paperback Original
This intricately layered novel spans three generations and several continents, highlighting the ways in which political decisions and imperial ambitions impact personal choices and lives, and how -- to put a fatalist spin on what turns out to be a determinedly optimistic book -- we are all history's playthings in the end.
The novel opens on a morning in 1945 in Nagasaki, when young Hiroko bids farewell to her British lover, Konrad. The day, as one can predict from being alerted to the time and place of the setting, does not go well. From the horrific opening, we follow Hiroko for decades, as she shows up in India and winds up in Pakistan, picking up a husband and in-laws along the way. Her knowledge of humankind and the world grows as she does, and some of the most touching passages in the novel are her reflections about individual destinies, how they shape character, and what the role of our society is in making us who we are. In reflecting on Konrad's family impending departing India in preparation for independence, Hiroko reflects:
A year or two, no more, James had told her, and then the British would go. It seemed the most extraordinary privilege--to have forewarning of a swerve in history, to prepare for how your life would curve around that bend.
Such simple yet deep insights about culture and its effects abound in the book.
The story also follows Konrad's British family as members move to America, return to Britain after India's independence, and return in various capacities to the hotbed of insurgency in the Afghan/Pakistan region.
Throughout the sweep of political tides, as relationships and connections are made, get broken, are renewed or severed, the cast of characters expands and are superbly woven in to the fabric of this beautifully written novel. Shamsie is a lyrical writer, with a keen eye for detail and a poignant way of phrasing every-day observations that feel new when she voices them.
War. Colonialism. Romance. Class issues. Tragedy. The seduction of religious extremism. The pull of secularism. Burnt Shadows has it all, with glimpses of what it's like to be a cosmopolitan Japanese woman living with the scars of one of the Second World War's World most shameful moments on her back, or -- as we experience in the final scenes -- a misunderstood Muslim captured in Canada, beginning the long journey to Gitmo.
***
The Story of a Marriage: A Novel
By Andrew Sean Greer
Picador: New York
April 2009
$14.00 Paperback
Published in hardback 2008
208 pages
How could I possibly explain my marriage? Anyone watching a ship from land is no judge of its seaworthiness, for the vital part is always underwater. It can't be seen.
"At the time," writes the narrator, Pearlie Cook, "my sense was that marriage was like a hotel shower: you get the temperature right and someone just beyond the wall turns on his shower and you are stung with ice water, you adjust the heat only to hear him yelp from pain, he adjusts his, and so on until you reach a tepid compromise that both of you can endure."
The time -- the early '50s -- is replete with adjustments, not just about marriage, but in arrivals home from Korean War and shifts in changing roles in society. And nowhere are these adjustments more manifest than in the Sunset district of San Francisco, where Pearlie and her veteran husband, Holland, struggle to put down roots.
The Story of a Marriage, released in April of this year in paperback, received mountains of praise and adulation when first published in hardback in spring of 2008, deservedly so.
The novel is a simple, straightforward story on the surface--part traditional love story, part near mystery--but the author layers intricate twists delicately into the plot, playing more often than not on readers' own assumptions about roles and characters. After a couple of unexpected turns, you learn to suspend expectations and predictions and ride with the flow of this beautiful, beautiful work, which features some of the most brilliantly crafted--yet simple--passages in any novel I've read in the past couple of years.
Example: When Holland confesses to Pearlie he thought about her for years while at war, she observes, simply: "How beautiful to find you once were someone's ghost."
Or take this passage:
We think we know them, the ones we love--for can't we see right through them? Can't we see their lungs and organs hanging like grapes under glass; their hearts pulsing right on cue; their brains flashing with thoughts we can so easily predict? But I could not predict my husband. Ever time I thought at last I'd seen to the bottom of him--he clouded over.
Or this, as she ponders, from the point of view of a woman, what it must be like to be a man (and then consider that a man is authoring this work, for a double reverse dose of awesomeness):
What is it like for men? Even now I can't tell you. To have to hold up the world and never show the strain. To pretend at every moment: pretend to be strong, and wise, and good, and faithful. But nobody is strong or wise or good or faithful, not really. It turns out everyone is faking it as best they can.
The novel's plot is full of well-timed surprises, as Pearlie gradually learns more about her husband's past--which she thought she was a part of--and even more about what she, herself, is capable of sacrificing for the sake of their son. Painstaking care is taken in describing the small details of every-day life, and of the heroics of those who keep things going and make the world comfortable for others. The richness of spirit embraced by the novel is rare, and puts it in a realm beyond a simple summer beach read, although the story is full enough of mystery to qualify as a good yarn on its own.