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Book Reviewed by:Heart-wrenching and darkly funny, Family Life is a universal story of a boy torn between duty and his own survival.
Hailed as a "supreme storyteller" (Philadelphia Inquirer) for his "cunning, dismaying and beautifully conceived" fiction (New York Times), Akhil Sharma is possessed of a narrative voice "as hypnotic as those found in the pages of Dostoyevsky" (The Nation). In his highly anticipated second novel, Family Life, he delivers a story of astonishing intensity and emotional precision.
We meet the Mishra family in Delhi in 1978, where eight-year-old Ajay and his older brother Birju play cricket in the streets, waiting for the day when their plane tickets will arrive and they and their mother can fly across the world and join their father in America. America to the Mishras is, indeed, everything they could have imagined and more: when automatic glass doors open before them, they feel that surely they must have been mistaken for somebody important. Pressing an elevator button and the elevator closing its doors and rising, they have a feeling of power at the fact that the elevator is obeying them. Life is extraordinary until tragedy strikes, leaving one brother severely brain-damaged and the other lost and virtually orphaned in a strange land. Ajay, the family's younger son, prays to a God he envisions as Superman, longing to find his place amid the ruins of his family's new life.
Heart-wrenching and darkly funny, Family Life is a universal story of a boy torn between duty and his own survival.
The choice of the first-person narrative is just right for the story, which above all, can be read as a special twist on the coming-of-age narrative. In fact, Sharma’s light-handed touch belies the expert way in which he slowly moves the focus away from the accident and the older brother to young Ajay. As the tragedy is now viewed through the rearview mirror, it’s all about the child and his self-centered preoccupation with young adulthood...continued
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(Reviewed by Poornima Apte).
In Family Life, the Mishras make their home in the New Jersey suburb of Iselin. Iselin and its sister suburb, the township of Edison, are known to most Indians across the United States as the place to visit for anything Indian. It's here that you can indulge a craving for Mumbai street food, check out the latest fashions, or pick up a new Bollywood movie on DVD.
Ethnic enclaves, local regions with significant concentrations of people of a particular ethnicity have always been a part of the United States, a country made up of immigrants. These enclaves serve to cushion the harshness of immigration, giving residents a taste of the mother country before they get fully assimilated into the adopted one. While large urban centers have often ...
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There's nothing like the pleasure of being devastated by a short novel. Like Jhumpa Lahiri, Akhil Sharma writes of the Indian immigrant experience with great empathy and a complete lack of sentimentality. Family Life is a dark and thrilling accomplishment by a wildly gifted writer.
