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Brick Lane by Monica Ali
The Blurb On The Back:
At the tender age of eighteen, Nazeen's life is turned upside down. After an arranged marriage to a man twenty years her elder she exchanges her Bangladeshi village for a block of flats in London's East End. In this new world, where poor people can be fat and even dogs go on diets, she struggles to make sense of her existence - and to do her duty to her husband. A man of inflated ideas (and stomach), he sorely tests her compliance.
But Nazeen submits, as she must, to Fate and devotes her life to raising her family and slapping down her demonds of discontent. Until she becomes aware of a young radical, Karim.
Against a background of escalating racial and gang conflict, they embark on an affair that finally forces Nazeen to take control of her life ...
I really enjoyed the first 200 pages of this book. Ali takes the reader on a journey from Nazeen's birth in a Bangladeshi village through to the early days of her marriage with Chanu and the first rumblings of discontent. The main theme of the book is submission to God's will and Nazeen's struggle to obey the teachings of Islam in the face of her own rising unhappiness is well portrayed - particularly in the late night scene where she stands on her own in the kitchen, looking at a fat lady in the flat opposite her whilst eating cury from Tupperware containers. I shared in Nazeen's bewilderment and her unhappiness with Chanu's big plans and little action and I enjoyed the description of her flat and her daily life, particularly the interaction with Razia and the increasingly sinister Mrs Islam.
For me, all this came to an end with the scenes involving Raqib, Nazeen and Chanu's baby son as the book started to lose direction when Raqib goes into hospital with an unknown illness. These are the scenes where Nazeen begins to take control of her destiny, where she fights against God's will for the life of her son with tragic results. Unfortunately, the way Ali approaches this is curiously lacking in structure - there were many points where the scene jumps, leaving me uncertain as to what precisely was happening. The final scene in particular was poorly written, with Nazeen returning to the hospital unaware that her son has died and discovers Chanu in the room. For some reason, Chanu seems to think that Nazeen has been told of the death but it's really not clear how or why he should think that at all.
I was also left cold by the parallel story of Nazeen's sister, Hasina, who did take control of her destiny by running off for a love marriage with a young man of her choosing. The whole storyline felt cliched - her husband ends up beating her, she runs away, is offered housing by someone who seems to be a kindly man who also gets her a job in a garment factory, is taken in by the manager's son who claims to have slept with her, is sacked, is raped by the kindly man who seemed to be helping her, becomes a prostitute, is taken in by one of her clients who later throws her out and finally she's rescued by a rich couple who've converted to Christianity. What is frustrating is that Ali makes the classic liberal, middle class mistake of equating lack of education with naivety. For this storyline to work, Hasina has to continually fail to learn from experience and ignore the warnings of people who know more. It defies logic and it's made worse by the fact that Ali doesn't really resolve the storyline at the end - all we learn is that Hasina has run away with another man.
If anything, Hasina's storyline is really there to reinforce the fact that all men are bastards and all Muslim men are hypocritical potential rapists. I can't help but think that if a white author was writing a story with the same message then there would be a huge backlash against such stereotyping. In fact, I have to say that I can think of only one potentially sympathetic male character in the whole book - Dr Azad, a man in an unhappy marriage who is trying to help the Bangladeshi community has best he can.
The affair between Nazeen and Karim feels slight and if anything, is there solely to give Nazeen something to do. I didn't believe in Karim in a character because I didn't believe why he would want to start a sexual relationship with Nazeen. In fact, the whole thing felt very underdeveloped and existed only to give Nazeen more angst. I also didn't believe Nazeen's relationship with her daughters, Shahana and Bibi, in that whilst I could believe Shahana's anger, I couldn't understand why it was manifested against her mother so much.
In conclusion, I don't think that Ali really moves beyond repeating cliches in this book and she does so in a way that really lost my interest after the half-way mark.
The Verdict:
From an interesting beginning, Ali's story disintegrates into cliches and unsympathetic characters. At no point did I ever manage to empathise with Nazeen or her plight and there were times when I felt that Ali took a somewhat condescending attitude towards people who lack education. The vast majority of male characters in the book are hypocrites, rapists, abusers or useless, something that made me feel very uncomfortable. Rather than an examination of women in Bangladeshi culture, I felt that I was being subjected to cultural stereotypes that were poorly drawn. Structurally the book didn't work for me - the letters from Hasina really needed to be in chapters of their own as they served to at times confuse timelines (in fact, the only time where I felt they worked was when Ali did put them in their own chapter). There were times when the timing felt incoherent as Ali jumps around between Nazeen's past and stories from her childhood and what was happening to her in the 'present'. I did like the storyline with the evil Mrs Islam, who I felt was well portrayed and Razia, Nazeen's friend was well drawn but they weren't enough to engage my interest for the last half of the book.
At the tender age of eighteen, Nazeen's life is turned upside down. After an arranged marriage to a man twenty years her elder she exchanges her Bangladeshi village for a block of flats in London's East End. In this new world, where poor people can be fat and even dogs go on diets, she struggles to make sense of her existence - and to do her duty to her husband. A man of inflated ideas (and stomach), he sorely tests her compliance.
But Nazeen submits, as she must, to Fate and devotes her life to raising her family and slapping down her demonds of discontent. Until she becomes aware of a young radical, Karim.
Against a background of escalating racial and gang conflict, they embark on an affair that finally forces Nazeen to take control of her life ...
I really enjoyed the first 200 pages of this book. Ali takes the reader on a journey from Nazeen's birth in a Bangladeshi village through to the early days of her marriage with Chanu and the first rumblings of discontent. The main theme of the book is submission to God's will and Nazeen's struggle to obey the teachings of Islam in the face of her own rising unhappiness is well portrayed - particularly in the late night scene where she stands on her own in the kitchen, looking at a fat lady in the flat opposite her whilst eating cury from Tupperware containers. I shared in Nazeen's bewilderment and her unhappiness with Chanu's big plans and little action and I enjoyed the description of her flat and her daily life, particularly the interaction with Razia and the increasingly sinister Mrs Islam.
For me, all this came to an end with the scenes involving Raqib, Nazeen and Chanu's baby son as the book started to lose direction when Raqib goes into hospital with an unknown illness. These are the scenes where Nazeen begins to take control of her destiny, where she fights against God's will for the life of her son with tragic results. Unfortunately, the way Ali approaches this is curiously lacking in structure - there were many points where the scene jumps, leaving me uncertain as to what precisely was happening. The final scene in particular was poorly written, with Nazeen returning to the hospital unaware that her son has died and discovers Chanu in the room. For some reason, Chanu seems to think that Nazeen has been told of the death but it's really not clear how or why he should think that at all.
I was also left cold by the parallel story of Nazeen's sister, Hasina, who did take control of her destiny by running off for a love marriage with a young man of her choosing. The whole storyline felt cliched - her husband ends up beating her, she runs away, is offered housing by someone who seems to be a kindly man who also gets her a job in a garment factory, is taken in by the manager's son who claims to have slept with her, is sacked, is raped by the kindly man who seemed to be helping her, becomes a prostitute, is taken in by one of her clients who later throws her out and finally she's rescued by a rich couple who've converted to Christianity. What is frustrating is that Ali makes the classic liberal, middle class mistake of equating lack of education with naivety. For this storyline to work, Hasina has to continually fail to learn from experience and ignore the warnings of people who know more. It defies logic and it's made worse by the fact that Ali doesn't really resolve the storyline at the end - all we learn is that Hasina has run away with another man.
If anything, Hasina's storyline is really there to reinforce the fact that all men are bastards and all Muslim men are hypocritical potential rapists. I can't help but think that if a white author was writing a story with the same message then there would be a huge backlash against such stereotyping. In fact, I have to say that I can think of only one potentially sympathetic male character in the whole book - Dr Azad, a man in an unhappy marriage who is trying to help the Bangladeshi community has best he can.
The affair between Nazeen and Karim feels slight and if anything, is there solely to give Nazeen something to do. I didn't believe in Karim in a character because I didn't believe why he would want to start a sexual relationship with Nazeen. In fact, the whole thing felt very underdeveloped and existed only to give Nazeen more angst. I also didn't believe Nazeen's relationship with her daughters, Shahana and Bibi, in that whilst I could believe Shahana's anger, I couldn't understand why it was manifested against her mother so much.
In conclusion, I don't think that Ali really moves beyond repeating cliches in this book and she does so in a way that really lost my interest after the half-way mark.
The Verdict:
From an interesting beginning, Ali's story disintegrates into cliches and unsympathetic characters. At no point did I ever manage to empathise with Nazeen or her plight and there were times when I felt that Ali took a somewhat condescending attitude towards people who lack education. The vast majority of male characters in the book are hypocrites, rapists, abusers or useless, something that made me feel very uncomfortable. Rather than an examination of women in Bangladeshi culture, I felt that I was being subjected to cultural stereotypes that were poorly drawn. Structurally the book didn't work for me - the letters from Hasina really needed to be in chapters of their own as they served to at times confuse timelines (in fact, the only time where I felt they worked was when Ali did put them in their own chapter). There were times when the timing felt incoherent as Ali jumps around between Nazeen's past and stories from her childhood and what was happening to her in the 'present'. I did like the storyline with the evil Mrs Islam, who I felt was well portrayed and Razia, Nazeen's friend was well drawn but they weren't enough to engage my interest for the last half of the book.