By Ellen Ullman Parul Sehgal, New York Times Book Review, Feb. 24, 2012 Pythagoras said the world was made of numbers; Democritus insisted upon atoms; Empedocles, four primordial elements — fire, air, water, earth. But Plato loved triangles. In his schema, matter was made up of triangles in kaleidoscopic configurations, triangles themselves divisible into tinier [...]
Archive for the ‘Reviews’ Category
By Blood
Posted in Reviews, tagged By Blood, Ellen Ullman, psychoanalysis, review of By Blood, San Francisco, The Eumenides, triangles on February 24, 2012 | Leave a Comment »
The Guardians: An Elegy
Posted in Reviews, tagged elegy, Harris Wulfsen, psychosis, review of The Guardians, Sarah Manguso, suicide on February 5, 2012 | Leave a Comment »
By Sarah Manguso Parul Sehgal, Plain Dealer, February 2012 On July 23, 2008, a young man leapt to his death in front of a Metro-North train in New York City. He was identified later as Harris Wulfson, a beloved Brooklyn, N.Y., musician who had suffered from intermittent psychotic episodes. He is eulogized in a new [...]
Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?
Posted in Reviews, tagged Accrington, Jeanette Winterson, memoir, review of Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? on February 4, 2012 | Leave a Comment »
By Jeanette Winterson Parul Sehgal, Bookforum Magazine, February 2012 Isaiah Berlin split intellectuals into two groups: foxes, who know a great deal about many things, and hedgehogs, who know one big thing. But I wonder if there isn’t a third type, too, mysterious and misunderstood: the individual who knows a great deal about one thing—and [...]
Behind the Beautiful Forevers
Posted in Reviews, tagged Annawandi, Behind the Beautiful Forevers, Bombay, Katherine Boo, Mumbai, Mumbai slum, One Leg, review of Behind the Beautiful Forevers on January 25, 2012 | Leave a Comment »
By Katherine Boo Parul Sehgal, O Magazine, January 25, 2011 Annawandi, “a sumpy plug of slum,” is tucked between the Mumbai airport and a fleet of luxury hotels, a rejoinder to the story of the “new,” prospering India. Here on reclaimed bog land, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Katherine Boo spent a little over three years among [...]
Salvage the Bones
Posted in Reviews, tagged Hurricane Katrina, Jesmyn Ward, National Book Award 2011, review of Salvage the Bones, Salvage the Bones on January 1, 2012 | Leave a Comment »
By Jesmyn Ward Parul Sehgal, The New York Times Book Review, Dec. 30 2011 Job has nothing on 15-year-old Esch. She’s poor and pregnant and plain unlucky. Mama’s dead, Daddy’s a drunk and dinner is Top Ramen every night. Sex is the only thing that has ever come easily to her. When the boys used [...]
A Year in Reading: Parul Sehgal
Posted in Reviews, tagged Best of 2011, John Cheever, The Journals of John Cheever on January 1, 2012 | 5 Comments »
Parul Sehgal, The Millions, December 16, 2011 There were many books I admired this year, books I read and reread and recommended. Salvage the Bones is every bit as good as they say it is. And there were groundbreaking narrative nonfiction books about India: Siddhartha Deb’s The Beautiful and the Damned, Arundhati Roy’s Walking with the Comrades, and [...]
The Stranger’s Child
Posted in Reviews, tagged Alan Hollinghurst, Bloomsbury, Cecil Valance, Review of The Stranger's Child, The Stranger's Child on November 9, 2011 | Leave a Comment »
By Alan Hollinghurst Parul Sehgal, Cleveland Plain Dealer, Nov. 1, 2011 “The Stranger’s Child,” Alan Hollinghurst’s first book since “The Line of Beauty,” the 2004 Man Booker Prize winner, is a sly and ravishing masterpiece. The novel skips with indecent ease through 100 years of British political and literary history, concealing its mighty ambition in charm and [...]
Hemingway’s Boat
Posted in Reviews, tagged Ernest Hemingway, Gigi Hemingway, Hemingway's Boat, Paul Hendrickson, Pilar, review of Hemingway's Boat on September 26, 2011 | Leave a Comment »
By Paul Hendrickson Parul Sehgal, The Plain Dealer, September 18, 2011 Papa can’t rest in peace. Has there been an American author more relentlessly mythologized, psychoanalyzed, and plain pilloried than Ernest Hemingway? He’s been labeled a brute, a bully and a bore. A heartless seducer of women and a closeted homosexual. An absurd cartoon of [...]
Noon
Posted in Reviews, tagged Aatish Taseer, india, Pakistan, Review of Noon on September 17, 2011 | Leave a Comment »
By Aatish Taseer, Faber & Faber. $25. Parul Sehgal, The New York Times Book Review, Sept. 16 Rehan Tabassum is in a bad way. Although, strictly speaking, the trouble isn’t of his making. He’s just got that kind of family — prone to falling in love with the servants, scheming against one another, messing with [...]
