PositiveThe Hindu (IND)For the first time in Lahiri, we have a central character who is able to gaze at her splintered self and sometimes laugh at what she sees. This is an improvement from her earlier works of unrelenting dourness and it makes Whereabouts a mature, unapologetic novel, which makes no attempt to please ... The filial relationship, or its vestiges rather, is the most fully defined sketch in this impressionistic novel.
Roy Jacobsen, trans. by Don shaw and don bartlett
PositiveThe Hindu (IND)The Unseen constantly reminded me of Bergman’s Through a Glass Darkly—its unsettling chiaroscuro and its setting in an island of the light nights. As in the movie, so in this novel the backdrop of the island serves as a pointer to our essential isolation and the philosophical implications of this loneliness ... But the islanders in Barrøy wouldn’t be caught dead pondering existential questions, at least consciously, simply because they cannot afford to ... The translators have expertly captured the nuances of the original, which made it to the Booker shortlist ... Since Jacobsen gives no pointer to that, you have to assume that it is the turn of the 19th century ... The Unseen reads like a tribute to that era’s realist novel, which tried to confer meaning to a fast-changing way of life by recording in detail its huge blows and small mercies, before the 20th century’s meaninglessness took over.
Elif Shafak
PanThe HinduThe literary merit of Elif Shafak’s latest novel is considerably compromised by her attempt to make a saint of her protagonist ... so edifying that you might grow a halo of reflected glory reading it ... To drive home her point about the injustice women and minorities are subjected to in Turkey, Shafak dunks her characters in every kind of imaginable trauma ... You pity Leila as a battered victim of circumstances, but when has pity made for great literature? ... [a] predictable novel ... it drips with sweetness, with a lot of hand-holding ... Whatever the demerits of 10 Minutes, Shafak is brave in writing about an issue that the state wants thoroughly hushed.
