Brick Lane

Rating:
Summary: Finding a place in the world.
Review: For me, the real story in Brick Lane is the incredible insularity of Nanzeen's domestic existence. Setting the story in a poor and dilapidated housing development, Ali envelopes us with the sites, sounds and smells of urban London, along with Nanzeen and Chanu's familial home. Brick Lane is an absolutely realistic immigrant story and the reader really gets a feel for what it must be like for new immigrants, many of who are from poor countries such as Bangladesh, who are trying to make homes for themselves in a new country.

Caught in an arranged, passionless marriage to the bombastic, idealistic Chanu, Nanzeen longs for something more. She stares out at the full moon late at night and wishes most of all for a secure place in the world, and a security she has tried to seek but just cannot find. She suffers terribly from homesickness and holds onto the memories of her childhood in Gouripur with her sister - she remembers the vibrant colour, the torrential rains, the golden land, deep green paddies, the snowy cranes, the drying rice stalks, and the village women who clean the large, bloody fish. Frustrated, frightened, and longing for independence, Nanzeen falls into a passionate relationship with Karim, a young local activist. The affair, while awakening her sexually, forces her to make life-changing decisions that reverberate throughout her family.

The first half of the novel is perhaps the most engaging as life in London is veiled though Nanzeen's eyes. Walking the streets of London with her sari and headscarf on, she's conscious of everyone watching her, and is startled by the differences in Western women - their short-cropped hair, and their propensity to wear trousers. Nanzeem is overwhelmed by London - the cars jamming the roads, the fatty smells, the people weaving in and out of the sidewalks and the tube stations There are some wonderful scenes describing the richness and vitality of immigrant life - the Wentworth Street Market, with its stalls lining the road, cloths draped on wire hangers in the windows, Jamaican patties on sale, and tinned foods at 40 percent off.

The story abounds with mouth watering descriptions of ethnic foods - the dal, chicken wings spread in a paste of yogurt and spices, chickpeas and tomatoes stewed with cumin, and hard boiled eggs glazed in a curry seal. So much detail is given to Nanzeen's apartment life - the papers and files, the glass showcase, the pottery tigers, lions and elephants, and a copy of the Qur'an in its special ledge. There are lots of issues raised in this book - racial unrest, the cultural clash, and the disenfranchisement of immigrant communities. Ali packs the narrative with so many concerns, that the story can be a little overwhelming, and interestingly much of the local ethnic tensions are framed against the events of 9/11. Brick Lane is an engaging and involving story, full of passion, drama and humour; it is well worth the journey.

Michael

Rating:
Summary: Sweeping the past from the Yellow brick Road
Review: I am a devoted fan of Indian novelists, those particularly observant writers who miss no detail while creating intensely personal landscapes of time and place. In Brick Lane, author Ali examines the life of Nazneen, a young Bangladeshi wife. The young woman settles in a London enclave filled with other Bengali tenants, all seeking assimilation while maintaining their cultural identity. Surrounded by familiar objects and customs, the immigrant community is constantly assailed by the inevitability of Westernization.

Following custom, Nazneen dutifully accepts marriage to the much older Chanu. Nazneen is an obedient wife, settled now in her London flat, her homesickness brightened by letters from Hasina, Nazneen's sister, who flaunts tradition by marrying for love. Over the years, the differences in their worlds are apparent, as the letters they exchange reflect their diverse paths. Through their letters, Nazneen examines her days as mother and wife, governed by minutiae, while Hasina is often at the mercy of changing circumstances.

Bengali lives are governed by strict traditions. While eyes watch and tongues wag with gossip, most of the women shun Westernization. Still, there is a profound cultural disturbance beneath the surface of the Bengali's world. It is nearly impossible to make a decent living; most are forced to work demeaning jobs to support their households, regardless of education and among the young people, there is a growing unrest. Some embrace the new lifestyle, while others are outraged by the implicit denial of Islamic tradition.

Nazneen is patient, wedded to her fate, but the couple's two daughters are a constant irritation to Chanu, especially the oldest, who exhibits the usual teenage angst. Accepting employment as a taxi driver, working nights, he finally acknowledges the sad truth of his diminished job prospects. Borrowing from a moneylender, Chanu purchases a sewing machine for Nazneen so she can do piecework for a local manufacturer, contributing to the family income.

While doing this piecework, Nazneen meets a young man with revolutionary dreams who yearns to direct the local Muslim population away from secularization and back to strict religious traditions. Karim picks up Nazneen's sewing daily and befriending her, he gradually challenges Nazneen to redefine her priorities and unquestioning acceptance of Fate's directives. For the first time, through his eyes, Nazneen views herself as a woman.

This is a small story on a large canvas, the universal struggle of people searching for personal definition and quality of life. Like pieces of a quilt, Ali stitches her eccentric characters together with subtle precision, from kind-hearted, plain-faced friends to hawkish moneylenders bleeding customers dry and pedantic old men longing for their birth country. While they trudge through daily difficulties, dreaming of home, most Bengali's accept their gradual acculturation, if unwittingly. In her way, Nazneen struggles to find her voice as a mother and wife, a woman of two worlds. Luan Gaines/2003.

Rating:
Summary: A gripping story about Bangladesh women at Home and Abroad
Review: "A man's character is his fate." With this quote from Heraclitus, Monica Ali takes us on Nazneen's 35-year fateful journey from her birth in 1967 in the Mymensingh District of East Pakistan to her independence in London in 2002. As a newborn she did not nurse for five days yet survived. In 1985, at age 18, she marries a man 22 years older whom she had never seen, a man who had been living in England since the early 1970s. Chanu needs her to cut his hair, his nails, and his corns, clip his nose hairs, feed him, keep his apartment clean, wash his clothes and to bear his children. When she is 21 she bears a son who dies after a year and then she has two daughters.

Chanu is educated and she is not. He has a degree from Dhaka University in English literature and is working for an Open University degree. She knew no English. When she expressed a desire to go college to learn English Chanu said "there was no need." What English she learned she learned from her daughters, who "demanded to be understood [in English]." She lives in a cube, with thin walls, falling plaster, and two sinks, in public housing. Her husband's ambition is humbled by the racial wall-at the age of 43 he resigns from his job in the council of the local government. After months of depression he determines to return to Dhaka and to raise money for his trip he becomes "driver number one-six one nine" for Kempton Kars.

It is Nazneen, however, who makes the money for the family with her sewing machine. She has an affair with a younger man when she is 34, a man who brings her garments to sew and is a founder of an active Islamic group, the Bengal Tigers. She learns about love from the wise Dr. Azad: ". . . 'there are two kinds of love. The kind that starts big and slowly wears away, that seem you can never use it up and then one day is finished. And the kind that you don't notice at first, but which adds a little bit to itself every day, like an oyster makes a pearl, grain by grain, a jewel from the sand.'"

Nazneen's younger sister Hasina, is always in the background. She never leaves Bangladesh. At age16 she elopes in a love marriage, a marriage that fails. She works as a machine woman sewing garments but her beauty is too much and she is locked out of the factory, accused of licentious behavior. She becomes a prostitute and marries Ahmed, one of her clients. Family pressure causes him to later turn against her. She seeks refuge in the House of Falling Women, run by Brother Andrew from Canada. Lovely hires her as a nanny for her son and daughter. Ultimately she runs away again with Lovely's young cook. It is Hasina who tells Nazneen about their mother's suicide dressed in her best sari. This is the mother who told her daughters "'If God wanted us to ask questions, he would have made us men."
Although Chanu has been gone from Bangladesh for over thirty years, he pines for home. He yearns for the sixteenth century, when Bengal was the "Paradise of Nations". When Dhaka was the home of textiles. When the Bengalis invented muslin and damask. In the Eighteenth Century Bengal provided one-third of the revenues of Britain's Indian Empire. He is pushed to return home by the anti-Islamic hostility after September 11, 2001. Chanu, at age 57, returns shortly thereafter without Nazneen and his daughter. He has plans to go into the soap business and to gain self respect.

The minor characters are fascinating and suggestive. In Bangladesh, there is Makku Pagla, always reading and carrying an umbrella who kills himself by falling down a well. There is Tamizuddin Mizra Haque the quiet barber who always knows the correct information about every thing. In London, there is Mrs. Islam, the money lender with her two sons, Number One and Number Two, as enforcers. There is Razia, Nazneen's closest friend whose husband dies when seventeen frozen cows fall on him in the slaughterhouse where he works. Her response is that "I can get that job now. No slaughter man to slaughter me now." Nazneen too becomes free for the first time with Chanu's departure for Bangladesh.
The novel has considerable depth to it. I strongly recommend it.

Rating:
Summary: Booker prize short list?
Review: Ali's writing is superb and she can describe place and situation as well as most anyone I've read. However, the novel is dissapointing. The heroine has an empty affair and is less than honest with both her lover and her husband. She allows her family to break up, and her children to lose their father (although she supposedly loves him) without any attempt to try to save things. But since she achieves "independence" in the process, we are unsubtly pushed by the author to approve. In the end, I felt the story promoted selfishness. The character development was also quite weak. It was an interesting read, but unmemorable and hardly worthy of the Booker short list.

Rating:
Summary: Bangladeshi immigrants in London. One woman's story.
Review: This is the story of a young Bangladeshi woman who is sent to London as a bride. It is the late 1980s and she has to adapt to the challenges of an arranged marriage. It is a restricted world, of course, as she rarely leaves their tiny apartment and everyone she meets is alo immigrant from Bangladesh. She does adjust though, and we follow her life for the next dozen years, including the tragic death of one of her three children. We also observe growing Islamic militancy and the influence of Western culture on traditional values.

It is only after we get to know this woman from the inside out that a new character is introduced, a young man full of Islamic fervor. By now it's 2001 and the whole community is affected by the events of 9/11.

We also get to see the infrequent letters she receives from her sister, who is still in Bangladesh. There's a constant contrast between the two sisters, the one in Bangladesh having run away for a "love marriage" with horrible results. She is cast out and alone and has to survive a factory job, then by selling her body, and later as a servant. Life in Bangladesh is harsh.

One of the best things about this book is how the author can really get inside these two womens' minds. One has accepted her fate. The other has fought against it. Both of them have different challenges. And each of them is a product of her culture as well as the world around her. All her descriptions ring true and made me look at things in a new way.

The author knows her subject well. She was born in Bangladesh and came to London as a child. She's now married and has two children. The photo on the flyleaf shows her in Western clothes. As I read the book, I kept turning to the photo and thinking about the unique world that she describes, and how different it is from mine.

Highly recommended.

Rating:
Summary: Where's the connection??
Review: This read was a huge disappointment. There were so many opportunities to draw the reader in, yet the author failed to make the catch. Developing a feel for these characters was difficult at best. As emotional events unfolded in the life of Nazneem, the author failed to take the extra step of connecting with the reader. At one point a significant loss occurs, yet the emotional aspects of such a tremendous loss are completely neglected.

Rating:
Summary: A sophisticated and wise look at both the home and the world
Review: As someone below wisely noted, Monica Ali's first novel, shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize (and expected to have won, though it lost out), is in many ways a response to THE HOME AND THE WORLD, the beautiful turn-of-the-century novel by Rabindranath Tagore, the Nobel prizewinning Bengali poet and novelist. As in Tagore's novel, Ali's work shows the very circumscribed world of a Bangla woman, her husband who adores her, and the young man who excites her, and the competing claims the public life makes upon her own inner sanctum. Nazneen, the central character of Ali's novel, is extremely beautifully fleshed out, and her inner life is probed with great profundity despite the quietness of her actions and the closed-in nature of her immediate physical world. Her stubborn and talkative husband Chanu--at times contemptible, at other times quite loveable, and always human-- also emerges as a memorable three-dimensional character, and their interactions frame an intelligent meditation on multiculturalism, on Islam, on women, on Britain, on Bangladesh. This is a superb first work--I cannot wait to see what Ali will write next.

Rating:
Summary: A book I will think about for a long time
Review: This Booker Prize-nominated novel provides engaging characters and thought-provoking insight into the Muslim immigrant world.

The main character, Nazneen, is a young "unspoiled" Bangladeshi village girl who enters into an arranged marriage with a much older Bangladeshi who lives in London. Her beautiful sister defies her father's wishes and elopes in a love match, running off to Dakha. Nazneen has been raised to accept whatever happens to her, but in London, gradually (over the course of 15 years or so) begins to take control of her own life.

Her husband Chanu at first seems clownlike, for example, he frames a collection of meaningless certificates for very minor achievements. Chanu regards himself as a scholar, because he has a BA from a Bangladeshi university, but he realizes that in Britain, he is regarded as nobody of any importance). Nazneen is expected to trim his corns every night, and later, his daughters are expected to sit beside him as he reads to turn the pages for him. But Chanu is a complex person who has a good heart, and the reader develops a fondness for this would-be patriarch. Life has not turned out as he wanted or expected, but he is devoted to his family.

Nazneen, on the other hand, had no expectations of life but has been swept along like a piece of wood in a river. Her transformation -- how to combine the traditional values and reject what is problematic in the western world while recognizing what is bad about the old ways and changing -- forms the plot of the book.

In the background is her sister's story, told in letters; the sister, who was more proactive in her choices, suffers the consequences, and it's hard to avoid wondering if the sister would not have been better off in an arranged marriage. The reader is left pondering Western vs. non-Western values, particularly with regard to love and marriage.

Like other reviewers, I found the use of broken English in her sister's letters baffling and annoying -- fortunately they were a comparatively small part of the book. If her sister was writing in Bengali, wouldn't it be grammatical at least? And why would her sister write in English (which would explain the bad grammar)?

The author has done a great job of creating a very different world for the reader to inhabit. Life for Muslim women both in a council estate (public housing project) in London (Nazneen's story) and a large city in Bangladesh (her sister's story) are described vividly and without romantic illusions.

This is not a quickly read book, but it certainly held my interest all the way through, and I will remember these characters for a long time.

Rating:
Summary: Tourists in their own Adopted Country
Review: Brick Lane focuses on the story of Nazneen who moves to a Bangladesh community in London when she is still very young. Her marriage to a man named Chanu was arranged and she had very little choice in what she wanted to do with her life. Her destiny as a housewife and mother seems to have been set, but one of the main focuses of this novel is questioning whether the individual can have a hand in forming his or her own destiny. This age old question is artfully contemplated as we follow Nazneen through a great portion of her life while she gives birth three times and cares for her husband. Much of the novel seems to pass in the calm routines of her daily life. However, now and then we are given glimpses of Nazneen's rebellious thoughts which signify that she is anything but a passive character. When she meets an attractive radical named Karim we are aware that everything could easily change.

Brewing beneath this internal and domestic struggle is a conflict in the community of Bangladesh immigrants who are caught between assimilation to English life and reinventing a shared space where they can express their religion and culture. Many of these people came to England with the hope of earning a fortune and returning to their own country triumphantly wealthy. This rarely happens. Many have to renegotiate their sense of their own identities to survive in a culture that is alien and sometimes hostile toward them. Political groups form in the community. Things come to a crisis. It becomes evident that the community is not as threatened by groups outside of itself as by it's own internal divisions. The fact that many of these Bagladeshi people live their entire lives in England and still feel like outsiders is illuminated in a scene where Chanu takes his family on a hilarious outing to view London like tourists.

Monica Ali gives tremendous dignity to all her characters. While many may feel a natural sympathy with Nazneen as a captive to her own household, the idealistic Chanu is drawn as a very complex and loveable character. He may be stubborn, unappreciative and lost in his own dreams. But he's also shown to be very loving, honest and loyal to his family. Throughout the entire novel Nazneen keeps in touch with her sister who lives a difficult life in Bangladesh. This gives a hint of the life she might have had if she had chosen not to obediently follow tradition and proceed with her arranged marriage. This novel is filled with humor and sorrow making it an extremely compulsive and delightful read. The familial struggles really transcend any national boundaries however formed they are by cultural traditions. Ali gives a truly universal story in a very specific setting.

Rating:
Summary: Fascination in the mundane and everyday
Review: Nanzeen is a Bangladeshi woman who marries young, sent to Britain to a husband chosen by her father. This book follows her journey, from naive village girl to mother of two living in modern London.

This book has been highly feted since before its publication (the author made it onto the Granta authors under 40 list based on an unpublished manuscript). As usually happens, this book doesn't quite live up to expectations. It has its faults - Ali uses the device of letters written by Nanzeen's sister to forward the plot, and while in short doses it is interesting, she over-uses it and a whole chapter of these letters is too much, especially as they are written in childish, broken English. And the pivotal affair between Nanzeen and a young Islamic activist is not very credible.

But there is more good about this book than bad - every character feels well rounded, and their motivations seem plausible without being overly obvious. This is a book that touches on a lot of political points (Islam, women's rights, culture clash etc) but avoids the soapbox and none feels shoehorned in. Most importantly, this is an interesting story well written that carries you along to the very end. While the setting and plot on first inspection could be considered mundane - a woman living in a council flat who does little else but cook, clean and care for her husband & children - is developed into an interesting story by great characterisation and a vibrant spin on universal themes. This is a longish book - over 400 pages - but it doesn't read as such. Taken on its own merits, rather than as the great 'Bangla' hope, this is a worthwhile book.