Sunetra Gupta Writing Career - Memories of Rain 1992

This website uses cookies to enhance user experience and to analyze performance and traffic on our website. Learn more Got it! SIGN IN Profile Picture BOOK REVIEWS NEWS & FEATURES KIRKUS PRIZE MAGAZINE WRITERS' CENTER MORE Profile Picture MEMORIES OF RAIN BOOKSHELF READ REVIEW 0 MEMORIES OF RAIN BY SUNETRA GUPTA ‧ RELEASE DATE: APRIL 1, 1992 Astunning, luminous debut set in Calcutta and London by a young, true heir to Virginia Woolf. The forward action of Gupta's hypnotic novel takes place during a single weekend: Calcutta-born Moni, despondent over her English husband's infidelity, secretly plans to take their daughter and return to India on the child's sixth birthday. But the stream- of-consciousness narrative weaves together memories and images, providing not just the history of a fragile love but of a woman's psychology and soul: Moni's brother first brings Anthony home in the rain-swollen dark of a Calcutta floodstorm. She and the English student fall in love, expecting an unconsummated passion and years of satisfying, sorrowful memories. Instead, they marry and make their home in London, where Moni—intense but too silent—soon disappoints. When Anthony begins to stray—even when his mistress becomes practically a member of the household—Moni believes his divided heart will add an edge to their painful, eternal love; she cannot bear it when his manner changes to kindness and indifference. Moni's sensibility—formed by the poetry (both English and Bengali) of anguished passion, darkness, and death—is the basis for gorgeous prose that flickers between romantic longing and exquisite detail. Gupta is impossible to quote briefly. In her sinuous sentences past and present, London and Calcutta, reality and shadow and the painful phrases of Tagore songs melt into one another in long continuous streams. A rare shimmering dream of a book. Pub Date: April 1, 1992 ISBN: 0-8021-1448-2 Page Count: 256 Publisher: Grove Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010 Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1992 Categories: LITERARY FICTION SHARE YOUR OPINION OF THIS BOOK DID YOU LIKE THIS BOOK? Comment on this book SHOW ALL COMMENTS MORE BY SUNETRA GUPTA A SIN OF COLOR BOOK REVIEW A SIN OF COLOR BY SUNETRA GUPTA THE VANISHING HALF BOOKSHELF Kin “[find] each other’s lives inscrutable” in this rich, sharp story about the way identity is formed. OUR VERDICT Our Verdict GET IT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER INDIEBOUND BESTSELLER 42 THE VANISHING HALF BY BRIT BENNETT ‧ RELEASE DATE: JUNE 2, 2020 Inseparable identical twin sisters ditch home together, and then one decides to vanish. The talented Bennett fuels her fiction with secrets—first in her lauded debut, The Mothers (2016), and now in the assured and magnetic story of the Vignes sisters, light-skinned women parked on opposite sides of the color line. Desiree, the “fidgety twin,” and Stella, “a smart, careful girl,” make their break from stultifying rural Mallard, Louisiana, becoming 16-year-old runaways in 1954 New Orleans. The novel opens 14 years later as Desiree, fleeing a violent marriage in D.C., returns home with a different relative: her 8-year-old daughter, Jude. The gossips are agog: “In Mallard, nobody married dark....Marrying a dark man and dragging his blueblack child all over town was one step too far.” Desiree's decision seals Jude’s misery in this “colorstruck” place and propels a new generation of flight: Jude escapes on a track scholarship to UCLA. Tending bar as a side job in Beverly Hills, she catches a glimpse of her mother’s doppelgänger. Stella, ensconced in white society, is shedding her fur coat. Jude, so black that strangers routinely stare, is unrecognizable to her aunt. All this is expertly paced, unfurling before the book is half finished; a reader can guess what is coming. Bennett is deeply engaged in the unknowability of other people and the scourge of colorism. The scene in which Stella adopts her white persona is a tour de force of doubling and confusion. It calls up Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, the book's 50-year-old antecedent. Bennett's novel plays with its characters' nagging feelings of being incomplete—for the twins without each other; for Jude’s boyfriend, Reese, who is trans and seeks surgery; for their friend Barry, who performs in drag as Bianca. Bennett keeps all these plot threads thrumming and her social commentary crisp. In the second half, Jude spars with her cousin Kennedy, Stella's daughter, a spoiled actress. Kin “[find] each other’s lives inscrutable” in this rich, sharp story about the way identity is formed. Pub Date: June 2, 2020 ISBN: 978-0-525-53629-1 Page Count: 352 Publisher: Riverhead Review Posted Online: March 15, 2020 Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020 Categories: LITERARY FICTION | GENERAL FICTION SHARE YOUR OPINION OF THIS BOOK DID YOU LIKE THIS BOOK? Comment on this book SHOW COMMENTS MORE BY BRIT BENNETT THE MOTHERS BOOK REVIEW THE MOTHERS BY BRIT BENNETT MORE ABOUT THIS BOOK Brit Bennett Wrestles With Identity in New Novel PROFILES Brit Bennett Wrestles With Identity in New Novel Today, GMA Unveil Book Club Picks SEEN & HEARD Today, GMA Unveil Book Club Picks Brit Bennett on the ‘Wildest Week’ of Her Life SEEN & HEARD Brit Bennett on the ‘Wildest Week’ of Her Life THE HANDMAID'S TALE BOOKSHELF Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse. 2 THE HANDMAID'S TALE BY MARGARET ATWOOD ‧ RELEASE DATE: FEB. 17, 1985 The time is the not-so-distant future, when the US's spiraling social freedoms have finally called down a reaction, an Iranian-style repressive "monotheocracy" calling itself the Republic of Gilead—a Bible-thumping, racist, capital-punishing, and misogynistic rule that would do away with pleasure altogether were it not for one thing: that the Gileadan women, pure and true (as opposed to all the nonbelieving women, those who've ever been adulterous or married more than once), are found rarely fertile. Thus are drafted a whole class of "handmaids," whose function is to bear the children of the elite, to be fecund or else (else being certain death, sent out to be toxic-waste removers on outlying islands). The narrative frame for Atwood's dystopian vision is the hopeless private testimony of one of these surrogate mothers, Offred ("of" plus the name of her male protector). Lying cradled by the body of the barren wife, being meanwhile serviced by the husband, Offred's "ceremony" must be successful—if she does not want to join the ranks of the other disappeared (which include her mother, her husband—dead—and small daughter, all taken away during the years of revolt). One Of her only human conduits is a gradually developing affair with her master's chauffeur—something that's balanced more than offset, though, by the master's hypocritically un-Puritan use of her as a kind of B-girl at private parties held by the ruling men in a spirit of nostalgia and lust. This latter relationship, edging into real need (the master's), is very effectively done; it highlights the handmaid's (read Everywoman's) eternal exploitation, profane or sacred ("We are two-legged wombs, that's all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices"). Atwood, to her credit, creates a chillingly specific, imaginable night-mare. The book is short on characterization—this is Atwood, never a warm writer, at her steeliest—and long on cynicism—it's got none of the human credibility of a work such as Walker Percy's Love In The Ruins. But the scariness is visceral, a world that's like a dangerous and even fatal grid, an electrified fence. Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse. Pub Date: Feb. 17, 1985 ISBN: 038549081X Page Count: - Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011 Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1985 Categories: LITERARY FICTION SHARE YOUR OPINION OF THIS BOOK DID YOU LIKE THIS BOOK? Comment on this book NO COMMENTS YET MORE BY MARGARET ATWOOD THE TESTAMENTS BOOK REVIEW THE TESTAMENTS BY MARGARET ATWOOD THE HANDMAID'S TALE BOOK REVIEW THE HANDMAID'S TALE BY MARGARET ATWOOD ; ADAPTED AND ILLUSTRATED BY RENÉE NAULT HAG-SEED BOOK REVIEW HAG-SEED BY MARGARET ATWOOD MORE ABOUT THIS BOOK Appreciations: Margaret Atwood’s Novel The Handmaid’s Tale Turns 30 PERSPECTIVES Appreciations: Margaret Atwood’s Novel The Handmaid’s Tale Turns 30 Nan A. Talese, Legendary Publisher, Is Retiring SEEN & HEARD Nan A. 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