Irreducible talent ... The writing may seem a bit woolly...but the contradictions are flagrant ... Translations are always destined to pale before the original.
It is a deliberately simple story, of considerable and radiating power. In tight, short chapters, a portrait builds up of a family dominated by an abusive father ... The triumph of this short, sometimes heartbreaking book is its patient attention to human psychology; and its narrator’s attempt at fair accounting is a constant riposte to the totalitarian monomania of his father.
Bajani carefully calibrates the tensions in the story, a balancing act that Geoffrey Brock skilfully retains in his English translation ... All this provides plenty to chew on, though occasionally Bajani’s prose can be more glutinous than nutritious. He has an insatiable appetite for the overblown metaphor ... The novel works best when Bajani speaks plainly of the torturous family dynamics ... As the book closes, we regain the purity of that teasing opening, where we wondered about the period without his parents being the best of his life. And despite the occasional bumps along the way, the ending works beautifully: plangent and intimate, as complex and contradictory as a family.
Avoidance of detail is at odds with the otherwise forensic quality of the writing, which feels intensely personal – almost obscenely intimate – but glimmers with moments of recognition. They are mostly unwelcome, but that only makes this searching, confrontational book more vital.
It’s hard to bring alive a personality this denuded on the page, but the attempt is impressive. The narrator’s interest in his mother feels genuine and the enterprise of giving this woman space in the book that she didn’t manage to claim in their home is generous and original. This didn’t stop the book from feeling wearily predictable to me ... The parents become too schematic and too extreme to sustain the narrative interest, and the reader is reliant on the narrator himself to do this ... I’d have liked him to face his own cruelty and continued ambivalence with more audacity.
Poignant ... Bajani writes masterfully of the confusion that marked the narrator’s early life, as well as the sadness that comes with the truth. The result is cathartic.
