George Peram's List: BOOK REVIEW

It's just that what Garber thinks literature teaches is not a set of univocal moral truths but rather a habit of mind: a way of questioning the world, a way of understanding just how hard it is to make decisions, fall in love, express desire, worship, rule and serve.

" Margaret Atwood makes me want to stick my head in the sand..., July 30, 2009
By
Susan Tunis
This review is from: The Year of the Flood: A Novel "

"A Year in Reading 2010"

"A Year in Reading: Margaret Atwood"

The Man Who Was Poe\nAvi\ndescription\nSet in 1848, this is the story of Edmund, an 11-year-old boy desperately trying to solve the mystery of his family's disappearance. Edmund enlists the help of a stranger named Auguste Dupin, unaware that the man is actually the writer Edgar Allan Poe. Does Poe really want to help Edmund, or is he just seeking out grisly material for his next story?\n

The Secret Life of Bees\nSue Monk Kidd\ndescription\nLily Owens is growing up in South Carolina in the mid-1960s, raised by her cruel father but cared for by Rosaleen, her African-American nanny. When Rosaleen tries to vote and is beaten for her trouble, she and Lily head for the town of Tiburon, a place with ties to Lily's dead mother, where they live with a local beekeeper, and where Lily learns valuable truths about her mother and herself. The story is supplemented by a great deal of information about bees, which is fascinating in itself.\n\n \ncritical reviews\n"[W]ell-intentioned, big-hearted, and sometimes as syrupy-sweet as the honey for which the industrious insects in the title are known. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but be warned....The good guys are flawless in this morality tale, the villains are wholly without decency....Nevertheless, despite its occasionally ham-handed symbolism, THE SECRET LIFE OF BEES can be rather touching." - Anne E. Grant (Washington Post Book World, 1/13/02)\n\n"A wonderfully written debut that rather scants its subject of loss and discovery...in favor of a feminist fable celebrating the company of women....Despite some dark moments, more honey than vinegar." - (Kirkus, 10/15/01)\n

Uninterrupted struggle for a writer to prove his authenticity and grace.

The Corrections
by Jonathan Franzen

my trade status

Government agent Rachel Sexton, the daughter of a prominent U.S. Senator, is sent to the Arctic Circle to investigate a questionable NASA discovery, which may be the first proof of extra-terrestrial life. Since both NASA and the incumbent president have grudges against Rachel's father, she has reason to think that she may be in the midst of a set-up. In the frozen north, she and her team locate a meteorite which contains fossils of insects unlike any found on earth, a landmark finding which seems to confirm the legitimacy of her mission. But when a civilian scientist goes missing near the site, it triggers a chain of events which will leave Rachel fighting to stay alive and unveil a shocking government plot. This was Dan Brown's third book, and the last he wrote in relative anonymity, before THE DA VINCI CODE made him one of the most popular and controversial authors of the early 21st century.\n

The Secret Life of Bees
by Sue Monk Kidd

Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review

Salman Rushdie, who aroused a controversy with his novel “Satanic verses”, now writes on a new idea but with the same ideology.
In his latest novel, Shalimar the Clown, he takes his reader to the lost Eden of Kashmir, that landlocked sliver of loveliness caught in a bloody geopolitical tug-of-war between Pakistan and India in the aftermath of independence from Britain in 1947. Within this story runs the story of doomed lovers belonging to Muslim and Hindu community respectively. from a lively playground of legends and folk art into a breeding ground for terrorism. The lovers of the novel are named Boonyi and Shalimar. Boonyi is the daughter of a Hindu pandit; Shalimar''s father is Muslim. But in their village of Pachigam, as in much of Kashmir at that time, the religions co-existed and even merged to an extent: Hindus adopted aspects of Muslim cuisine, and Muslims worshipped local Hindu saints and prayed at the same shrines. On the night of Boonyi and Shalimar''s birth, their families are performing at a banquet laden with tradition and magic—an event that represents the high point of the region''s syncretic cooperation. Then news comes that the Pakistani army has crossed into Kashmir, its murderous rampage signaling the end of an idyll.
Ignorant to politics, the two children grow performing in an ancient form of folk performance called clown stories. At 14, Boonyi, egged on by the ghost of her dead mother decides to achieve her love for Shalimar. The writer here shocks his reader when he tells him that rather than reacting with outrage, the families bless their marriage in a touching last gasp of Kashmiriyat, "the belief that at the heart of Kashmiri culture there was a common bond that transcended all other differences."
But losing her virginity triggers something insolent and thoughtless in Boonyi that attracts the attentions of Max Ophuls (no relation to the director), a debonair U.S. ambassador to India. Their scandalous affair leaves Boonyi in shame and launches the cuckolded Shalimar on a journey into the

The man who was known for years as Shalimar the Clown is now a Kashmiri Muslim terrorist named Noman Sher Noman, who brutally murders Max Ophuls, an American diplomat (and counter-terrorism expert), in Los Angeles in 1991 after his wife, Boonyi, has an affair with Ophuls. This killing sets off the chain of events in Salman Rushdie's ninth novel. SHALIMAR THE CLOWN follows both Noman and the ambassador into their pasts, finds connections between their lives, details the story of Noman's wife Boonyi and Ophuls's daughter India, and provides a sprawling portrait of a very troubled Kashmir in the recent 20th century. Salman Rushdie, no stranger to fanaticism and terrorism, has obviously drawn on the dramatic events of his own life for some of the details here, but the story spirals out into a huge, epic, multicultural fable.

description
Booker Prize-winner Sir Salman Rushdie allows his fantastical tendencies full reign in his sprawling and whimsical ENCHANTRESS OF FLORENCE, a literary riff on the THOUSAND AND ONE NIGHTS. By setting his tale in Florence when the Italian town was ruled by the Akbar Empire, Rushdie allows himself to possess the entirety of both Western and Eastern culture, and his novel includes Persian princesses and European knights alike. Familiar historical figures such as Machiavelli make appearances, as does Vlad the Impaler, and the book churns itself into a stew of styles, fairy tales, and cultural and literary allusion.

Timeline: Ai Confini Del Tempo
Michael Crichton