Fill out this form to email this article to a friend
'A Golden Age' full of beginnings
The book launches a trilogy that takes place in Bangladesh.
By Vikas Turakhia, Special to the Times
Published January 27, 2008
A Golden Age
By Tahmima Anam
Harper, 288 pages, $24.95
---
Tahmima Anam's glittering debut, A Golden Age, comes at a ripe time for literature focused on South Asian women. Readers of Khaled Hosseini's brutal but magnificent A Thousand Splendid Suns will find similar pleasures in Anam's book, the first of a planned trilogy set in Bangladesh. Beginning in 1959, Anam's novel centers on Rehana Haque, a young widow stripped of her children by her brother-in-law. He argues in court that she lacks the financial means to care for her son, Sohail, and daughter, Maya, and he is granted the right to move the children from their home in Dhaka, East Pakistan, to his residence more than 2,000 miles away in Lahore. At first Rehana struggles though her grief, reaching a point where "her memories of the children were scrambled and vague." After two years, however, Rehana mysteriously comes up with enough money to build a second house on her property, securing a rental income and the return of her children. Rehana's childless years form only the prologue to A Golden Age, but the possibility that she will suffer such loss again hovers over the entire novel. A Golden Age then jumps to 1971, as East Pakistan declares its independence as Bangladesh. The rift dividing Pakistanis has existed since the country was originally conceived as "two halves, poised on either side of India like a pair of horns." The resulting war makes up the rest of the novel. Dhaka suffers under attacks that leave buildings with "tank-sized holes" in their sides and "corpses piled onto the pavement like cakes in a window." Rehana goes without seeing Sohail and Maya for weeks, thinking, "A toothache is the sort of thing I used to worry about. Now I worry about your legs, your heart, your life." Anam offers a compelling example of what a mother is willing to do for her children in a war that "has taken so many sons" and "burned so many daughters." Vikas Turakhia teaches high school English in Ohio.
[Last modified January 23, 2008, 18:17:44]
Share your thoughts on this story
|
News
Fifty years ago, they were screwed-up kids sent to the Florida School for Boys to be straightened out. But now they are screwed-up men, scarred by the whippings they endured. Read the story and see a video and portrait gallery.
Print
Email story
Comment
Letter to the editor
