Could it take me longer to read a book? I made myself read this book everyday so I could be done with it and properly hate it.Look at what the NY Review of Books said:"Ali succeeds brilliantly in presenting the besieged humanity of people living hard, little-known lives on the margins of a rich, self-absorbed society."WHO IS THIS CRAZY NUT? You need to read a book like Brick Lane to understand "besieged humanity" or what it's like to live a "hard, little-known" life? The protaganist moves around in the book like she's had a lobotomy. It wasn't until page 152, I believe, when Nazneen giggles. FINALLY, the woman shows a sign of life. Her senses are completely dulled. Don't buy into the crap about "what it must be like to live a suppressed/oppressed life as a Muslim woman." That's not what's going on. Compare Nazneen's character to that of her sister, aunt, and friends. It's a wonder that lifeless Nazneen even moves into an affair with a younger man. The most ridiculous part (and because of that, maybe the most enjoyable?) of Nazneen's story is when she stops this evil money lender Mafia-like woman in the story by asking her to swear on the Qu'ran. Really, is that all it took? This woman is an interest-charging money lender (which, apparently, is a big NO-NO as a Muslim) who runs a religious school for girls and raises her sons to be repo-man thugs but she's afraid to swear on the Qu'ran because of an accounting discrepancy? Score one for Nazneen and her growing independence!OK, to be fair, Nazneen is supposed to be a woman who is passive. Her own mother left Nazneen's entrance into the world up to Fate and that fatalism is what she was raised on. But how she moved from that passivity into an affair with a younger man? Kind of muddy. And her decision to stand up to her husband and stay in the UK with the kids? Little murky. But why should I nitpick? Who knows why we do anything in this world?Back to being unfair (because I was so bored by this book)...If you read it, you'll actually end up sympathizing with her husband Chanu..seriously. If you've started reading the book, you will understand what I mean. I know he's supposed to be some idiot windbag who talks like a bigshot at home but deals with the disappointed fragments of his dreams outside the home, but do we need 200 pages of his pathetic flaps to understand this??? And, if one could isolate the number of sentences or paragraphs that concerned the corns on his feet, could there be about 20 pages? Is this the same "brilliant book about things that matter" that Ian Jack of Granta refers to? People! Puh-leeze give me a break!THE ONE REALLY GOOD THING ABOUT THIS BOOK is the story about Nazneen's sister. She writes letters to her sister detailing her life in Dhaka. The character Hasina is everything that Nazneen is not: angry, sad, happy, determined, loving, and alive. Her life is amazing. The letters alone saved the book. However, even this was ruined by Monica Ali. Why did Hasina's letters need to be written in some strange broken English or literally translated Bengali? If we can view Nazneen's life through grammatically correct English, why can't we understand Hasina in something gramatically correct? Is this to emphasize her distance? Whatever. Weird and frustrating to read.
I thought this book was great. My favorite character was Chanu, I thought he was the perfect depiction of the "big man" immigrant who has the air of superiority over his own countrymen because he's an "educated man" in a "modern society", but ultimately has no accomplishments to support his self-image, just a maze of unfinished (never really started) projects and ideas. Nazneen, the main character, was sent off from Bangladesh to London in an arranged marriage with Chanu, and watching her slowly come to understand that he's nothing but talk, and then eventually come around to finding the soft man underneath, it seemed very real and was quite fun.I also loved the whole portion with the sister, Hasina, all the letters she wrote and the sudden gap in dates when her life fell apart. Yes you have to suspend disbelief a bit with the contents of the letters, sentences improperly formed to indicate the lack of education, but snippets of wisdom that you'd not expect even in a letter from Proust. But my feeling is that that only added to the charm. My complaint with the novel is just the whole last half. I didn't care for the whole thing with Karim at all. It seemed largely unrealistic, uninteresting, and just went on too long. The "climax" with her daughter running away, seemed artificially inserted for the sake of having a "climax" and didn't really fit with the rest of the novel. And then the story just ended.I get that this half was about Nazneen getting her independence, learning things that Chanu was ignorant of, and also playing on the comparisons of downfalls of the sisters, and those were all actually great aspects. However the extent to which that was told was disproportionate to the rest of the novel. Additionally it felt like it needed a "what she did with this new-found independence", but like I said the story just ended; yeah she did make one decision with her independence but that felt like too little.Overall though, I still thought it was a highly enjoyable read, well worth the time.
What do You think about Brick Lane (2004)?
I really would give this a 3.5 but thought it deserved rounding up rather than down. This is a very clever book on several levels. The writing is superb, particular Ali powers of description. She can describe a character in such comical detail you feel you are standing right in front of themThe story is told through the eyes of Nasreem, a young village girl from Bangladesh who has been married to an Immigrant in London.Also to a lesser degree by her sister who still lives in a city in Bangladesh
—Elaine
This book impressed me because of its immersiveness. Not only in terms of time and place, although that was very well handled, but mostly in terms of character. There are few modern human experiences that could be farther from my own than those of a woman born and raised in Bangladesh relocating to London after an arranged marriage to a man already living there. But I found the main character of Brick Lane, Nazneen, to be very relatable, to the point where I ended up totally immersed in her story and her perspective. That was a pretty heart-wrenching experience, honestly, because Nazneen's story is one of disappointment and fear and powerlessness, right up until just before the very end. This is one of those books which is beautiful, but in which the beauty comes almost totally from sadness. It doesn't exactly have a happy ending in the fairytale sense, but I was pretty pleased with the way things were left by the final page.
—Dale
Nazneen is a Bangladeshi village girl who has just come of age when her marriage is arranged to an older man living in the distant fantasy of London. Brick Lane chronicles the story of her marriage, her children, the public housing complex she lives in, and her struggle to make sense of her role in a world very different from the one she was raised in.Among the more interesting parts of the book were the outlines of the cultural challenges of Bangladeshis living in England. I learned a lot about a community that was unfamiliar to me, and that kept my interest for a time. As the story progressed, however, I found myself struggling to continue. The author uses letters from Nazneen's sister back in Bangladesh to detail the horrors of life in that challenged country, and there were times the story felt strangely predictable in its recitation of the major tragedies of overt violence and the lesser tragedies of accumulated disappointments.Nazneen is also a very passive character, and although the book traces her evolving relationship to her own will, it does so in an agonizingly slow fashion. The center of this book drags so heavily I nearly abandoned it. Ultimately, I'm glad I continued because the pace of the story picked up and lead to a more satisfying ending than I would have expected. I would recommend it primarily to readers with an interest in intercultural issues and a lot of patience.
—Lena
