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Review: Undiscovered Country

3m — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 01:13:08 +0000

The undiscover’d country, from whose bourn
No traveler returns, – HAMLET

Lin Enger’s debut novel is a modern take on Hamlet, but with a few differences from the original. Even though I’m very familiar with the play, I found that Undiscovered Country surprisingly kept me in suspense throughout. There were just enough differences to keep me more than interested in the novel.

Set in wintry Minnesota, Jesse finds his father in the woods — dead from an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. While the local law enforcement thinks it’s a closed case, Jesse refuses to believe that his father committed suicide and sets out to prove it. Of course there’s a suspicious uncle in the story as well as an ‘Ophelia’, but it doesn’t always follow the ’script,’ so there is that element of suspense to the tale.

Enger’s descriptions of the starkly cold winters in Minnesota really add to the atmosphere of the book, and his writing of the characters, though familiar, seem very real. We feel Jesse’s angst, just as we did Hamlet’s. We want justice, just as we do in Shakespeare’s play. I would love to read and compare this book to The Story of Edgar Sawtelle and The Dead Father’s Club, both also modern retellings of the famous play.

Lin Enger is the brother of Leif Enger, who wrote Peace Like a River, which I loved, and also So Brave, Young, and Handsome, which I hope to read sometime this year. I’ll definitely keep an eye out for Lin Enger’s next novel as well.

2008, 304 pp.

Unaccustomed Earth

3m — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 11:33:57 +0000

Although I haven’t yet read Jhumpa Lahiri’s Pulitzer Prize winning Interpreter of Maladies, after reading Unaccustomed Earth, I can understand why the committee was so impressed with her writing. Her stories of the Bengali immigrant experience were very well developed, and they had closure to them, something I’ve noticed is often times lacking in modern short stories. All the characters in the book have similar backgrounds — high intelligence and high potential — yet each story was unique. Each character was struggling with his or her own set of issues, most of them due to the individuals’ adjustment, or lack thereof, of living in a culture so different from their own or that of their parents.

Themes explored include family, loyalty, duty, and honor. Relationships encountered were father and daughter, husband and wife, brother and sister, roommate to roommate, and childhood friend to childhood friend. Birth, life, marriage, children, divorce, and death. These few stories covered a wide range of experiences of the Bengali immigrant living in America and illustrated well how being Bengali shaped the characters’ choices.

Highly recommended. I will definitely be reading Interpreter of Maladies and The Namesake at a later date.

2008, 333 pp.
Rating:

The Uncommon Reader

3m — Sat, 10 Nov 2007 15:35:08 +0000

This novella traces the Queen of England’s reading habits. She goes from being wholly ignorant of books and the literary life to being very knowledgeable and voracious in her reading-very much to the consternation of the Queen’s and the Prime Minister’s staff.

I enjoyed this book tremendously not only because of my obvious love for the subject matter, but also because it was very humorous. I laughed out loud while reading several times. However, it does have (ever so few, but still) some content issues that just seemed wholly unnecessary to the storyline. It would have been a ’4.5′ otherwise.

2007, 120 pp.
Rating: 4