A Golden Age

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Ca poveste, romanul este frumos, vocea Rehanei te atrage intr-o istorisire simpla, o descriere usor naiva a unor evenimente dramatice (cand profesori si intelectuali erau executati la Universitate, personajele noastre mananca byiriani si o casatoresc pe Sylvie).

Parveen Haque: Faiz's wife. She cannot have children so works to have Rehana seen as unfit after the death of Iqbal so that she have get custody of Sohail and Maya. [4] Sorry folks I'm having a hectic time recently, I wanted to write a detailed review on it, but couldn’t manage enough time, so maybe in future....... 😅 ] Then 25 th of march. The Pak Sena gunned down Shahid Minar, University halls and Madhuda’s canteen, murdered eminent academics and several innocent citizens (Ref. The days of 1971). Rehana, Sohail and Maya was in the house of Mrs. Chowdhury where out of panic, Mrs. Chowdhury forced her daughter Silvi to marry Sabeer. The behavior of the characters that Tahmima portrayed throughout the book are simply illogical and out of consistency.

A Golden Age

The book was originally published in the United Kingdom by Canongate Books, [14] and then later published in the United States by HarperCollins. [4] Its original release date was 8 January 2007, [14] and it has been translated into 22 languages. [15] Critical reception [ edit ]

Sohail and Maya were born in Dhaka and their native tongue is Bengali and have an easy loyalty to Bangladesh. [13] She must search within herself if she believes in the war and finding independence for Bangladesh. [1] Rehana finds her nationalism within her own experiences and those she loves that have brought the idea of the nation of Bangladesh to hold significance for her. [1] Women's experience in war [ edit ] At the same night Mrs. Chowdhury’s dog Romeo got dead out of fear. In ‘The days of 1971,’ Imam’s dog also died that night. What a Dog-to-Dog resemblance! Rehana's story shows the often forgotten experience of women in war. Rehana must bear the deepest part of her soul to save her children. This includes giving up the man she grows to love to save her son and herself. This story reveals that while a women's role in war is different, they too do not come out untouched. [1] [5] Publication [ edit ] The novel was immediately praised for both its breadth and its unique point of view. Kamila Shamsie in The Guardian wrote that “One of the novel's great strengths is its decision to show war from the perspective of the women who cannot join the armed resistance and must instead find a way to live in the limbo world of a city in curfew” (March 2007). The New Yorker was impressed by “a striking debut novel” that “deftly weaves the personal and the political, giving the terrors of war spare, powerful treatment while lyrically depicting the way in which the struggle for freedom allows Rehana to discover both her strength and her heart” (January, 2007). I have done quite a bit of reading this year on India and the subcontinent, both fiction and non-fiction, so the many untranslated phrases, names of foods, items of clothing, prayer times and rituals, etc, were all quite familiar to me, but for the uninitiated a glossary would have been helpful.Some of the finest moments of the novel are its quietest - Rehana hearing Nina Simone for the first time, her voice "a thousand years of sorrow"; the desolation of a half-built house during the monsoons with "tadpoles swimming like lines of ink" in the pool which should have been a tiled floor; beautiful evocations of Bengal's countryside and its hill stations. The novel moves from pain to beauty, and often treads a line between the two. Sohail, the dreamer-turned-warrior, asks of the struggle for independence: "How can it be the greatest and the very worst thing we have ever done?" The comment had stung because it was probably true. Lately the children had little time for anything but the struggle. It had started when Sohail entered the university. Ever since '48, the Pakistani authorities had ruled the eastern wing of the country like a colony. First they tried to force everyone to speak Urdu instead of Bengali. They took the jute money from Bengal and spent it on factories in Karachi and Islamabad. One general after another made promises they had no intention of keeping. The Dhaka university students had been involved in the protests from the very beginning, so it was no surprise Sohail had got caught up, Maya too. Even Rehana could see the logic: what sense did it make to have a country in two halves, posed on either side of India like a pair of horns? Until the end of 1971, Bangladesh, inhabited mainly by Bengalis, was known as ‘East Pakistan’. West Pakistan, now all that remains of Pakistan is, and was inhabited by a Punjabi majority. In 1970, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman (‘Mujib’,a Bengali) and his party won the parliamentary elections. Mujib was prevented from taking office by President General Yahya Khan, of West Pakistan, who along with many of his fellow Punjabis and Pathans held the Bengalis in low regard. He arrested Mujib in early 1971 and launched a vicious military assault on East Pakistan. Its aim was to decimate the Bengali population. During this operation, about a million East Pakistanis fled to neighbouring India and anything between 30,000 and 3,000,000 East Pakistanis were massacred. Had it not been for the intervention of Indian armed forces, many more would have been killed. By the end of 1971, Yahya’s forces were defeated; Mujib was released, and soon after this East Pakistan divorced itself from West Pakistan and the republic of Bangladesh was born. While this is a beautiful setup, and there are some very striking scenes, it is sadly not because of the book that they are striking, it is simply history. The story falters when it isn't tagging along with the fantastical events of what actually happened. The writing is flabby and weak before the war starts and when it hits, the bad guys are easy to spot (they're either obscenely rich and wanting to commit genocide or else they have spittle--her word, not mine--hanging from their mouth) and the good guys are just plain old good. There is no room left for the complicated middle that war embodies. War is people doing terrible things to each other, something that the author refuses to bow to, as it would sully her perfectly formed, not really believable characters. a b "Tahmima Anam Completes Her 'Bangladesh Trilogy' with The Bones of Grace". The Telegraph. Kolkota. Archived from the original on 19 January 2018.