MixedVultureDesai intelligently recasts the 19th-century marriage plot as a 21st-century story of global identity. The romance, however, competes with the tale of trauma ... The sentences get sloppier as the book nears its conclusion, a sure sign it is straining under the weight of its many competing elements ... The protagonists’ many plotlines...do not advance the concepts at stake ... It is tempting to admire long novels solely for the sheer labor that goes into crafting them. And long novels are sometimes even more pleasurable for their glorious mess, assuming they add up to something fresh. But upon reaching page 688, it is disappointing to feel, despite Desai’s many talents, that Sonia and Sunny is ending very close to where it began.
PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewAdmirably resists the interpretive clarity the world craves from Angela ... Often funny, and pleasantly odd ... As Angela grows increasingly delirious with hunger, Plum fragments her prose into a kind of self-conscious poetry that strains beneath the weight of the plot ... But the pleasure of this book lies not in its plot or even in its characters (Angela is more voice than character), but in the intimacy of its setting.
PanVultureProves that she is still a gifted storyteller, yet her fame has indeed affected her work ... Adichie’s writing is as confident as ever, and she retains her talent for rendering heterosexual intimacy ... Immersive storytelling allows Dream Count to nearly pass for a successful work of psychological realism about love, friendship, immigration, and making a life of one’s own — a pretty good story. But Adichie’s oeuvre has always been about both individual people and the social contexts that shape them, and, similarly, this book is not just a tale of four women’s lives; it’s also about the social worlds those women inhabit. And as a broader social novel — Dream Count falls short ... Dream Count’s relationship to its thematic material, gender, is one-note ... So uncritically hung up on its men that it neglects its women ... None of the women’s perspectives on gender or power has a chance to challenge or complicate any of the others — and thus the reader’s ... Dream Count’s intellectual thinness shortchanges the stories Adichie wants to tell.
Salman Rushdie
MixedVulture\"Knife is in part about—and in some sense itself is—a battle between the two most prominent Rushdies: Great Writer and Great Man, artist and advocate, private person and public figure. At its best, the book speaks to what it has been like for someone who thinks of himself as a writer by vocation and a free-speech activist by conscription to try to make art, not to mention a life, under extraordinary circumstances. At its worst, Knife can leave the reader feeling unsure of which Rushdie it speaks for, which Rushdie we should remember ... Like Joseph Anton, Knife is Rushdie’s attempt to deal with an absurd and traumatic event, \'owning what had happened, taking charge of it,\' an endeavor to \'answer violence with art.\' Unlike Joseph Anton, Knife is taut, readable, and, thankfully, not petty. The first chapter, in which Rushdie recounts the attack itself, contains some of the most precise, chilling prose of his career ... Indeed, Knife is at its strongest when Rushdie-the-novelist narrates the material of his own life ... The rest of Knife is less precise than the material about the A. The word meditations in the title may be a preemptive defense against the accusation that, as a complete work, Knife is somewhat inchoate. But the lack of clarity in Knife’s mission can feel distracting ... If Knife sometimes feels like it was hastened to press, if its conclusion reads like an epiphany forced on deadline, it’s probably because Rushdie, reasonably, wants to spend his remaining years on the struggle he actually chose, not the one he was coerced into.\
Amitava Kumar
RaveThe Millions...an intelligent and intimate novel which employs the increasingly popular techniques of auto-fiction and melds the bawdry humor of Hanif Kureishi with a W.G. Sebaldian wandering consciousness that cannibalizes—and analyzes—every image, cultural object, and idea it encounters ... For every dip Montana takes into pleasure, it wades deeper into politics, displaying a concern for larger questions of exile ... Ah, and then there are the pleasures of the novel’s form and style, which befit its subject matter. Many lovely and satisfying immigrant novels by authors like Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie or Sunjeev Sahota have hewn to traditional narrative structure. Kumar’s is a different, not necessarily superior but certainly refreshing, stylistic approach.
