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The Orphan Master's Son

2012; University of Oklahoma; Volume: 86; Issue: 5 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/wlt.2012.0141

1945-8134

John Allen,

Caribbean history, culture, and politics

SEPTEMBER–OCTOBER 2012 67 David Dabydeen Pak’s Britannica Lynne Macedo, ed. University of the West Indies Press A celebrated Caribbean writer and professor, Dabydeen has tackled issues ranging from slavery to Shakespeare, always with an unapologetic eye to the marginalization of black culture. A collection of essays and interviews, Pak’s Britannia is the first book devoted exclusively to Dabydeen’s academic work. Roser Caminals The Street of the Three Beds University Press of the South A rich heir seeks to understand the disappearance of his seamstress mistress. Set in late-nineteenth-century Barcelona, The Street of the Three Beds explores the connections between the city’s prosperous elite and its seedy underside. Originally written in Catalan, it is now also available in Spanish and English. Nota Bene Teddy must give way to the perverse speculation and advice of his crooked superior, Inspector Malangi. When paired with the advice on marriage that Alice receives from her superior , Sister Hina Alvi, the couple falls, powerless, into a trap of distrust. As if trying to work a thankless job and balance an unstable marriage to a Muslim man she hardly knows were not difficult enough, Alice finds herself suddenly engulfed in acts of divine intervention at the Sacred Heart. It is through the juxtaposition of human baseness and seemingly miraculous events that Hanif weaves his tale, thus exploring the bounds of humanity at both ends, in depravity and in divinity. With a profession of love at gunpoint, a man severing his own thumb, and a laborious stillbirth, this novel is not for the faint of heart. The action of the novel steamrolls through to the end, thus keeping readers engaged through the last page, even if the novel does seem to end a bit abruptly. Once the action of the novel is concluded, Hanif includes a letter from Alice’s father that calls into question the nature of Alice as a person, a nurse, and a wife. Much like E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India, Hanif ends the novel with more ambiguity over the very questions he begins with—namely, what roles truth and order have in current Pakistani life and whether or not Catholic and Muslim relations can find common ground. Although the novel does not conclude as neatly as Hanif’s first novel, A Case of Exploding Mangoes, it is just as well written . What’s more, the characters who comprise Our Lady of Alice Bhatti offer more dimension than their predecessors in A Case of Exploding Mangoes. Mohammed Hanif’s second novel proves to be a deep, gritty, and exciting addition to his literary career. Melanie Wattenbarger University of Nevada, Las Vegas Adam Johnson. The Orphan Master’s Son. New York. Random House. 2012. isbn 9780812992793 The Orphan Master’s Son follows Jun Do, a man searching for identity while succumbing to the impulsive and oppressive whims of the North Korean government. I already need to remind myself: this is a review of Adam Johnson’s modern Orwellian epic, not a highlight reel relaying the orchestrated horrors of Kim Jong Il’s living symphony. I wonder if Johnson had a similar struggle. Although the novel’s protagonist , Jun Do, displays model citizenship , he finds himself a victim of the government’s calculated whims, including his frequent transfer among the county’s worst jobs—tunnel soldier, kidnapper, naval spy— before being sent to Prison 33, a prison modeled after North Korea’s present-day concentration camps. What follows is a complex premise that introduces a nameless state interrogator who oscillates between his own story of struggle with his aging parents’ fear disguised as patriotism and the biography of Jun Do, who, in an oddly logical attempt to control his own identity, assumes the identity of Commander Ga, the nation’s most respected and highestranking war hero, in order to defy Kim Jong Il on behalf of the national actress, Sun Moon. Of course, the story is peppered with hilariously absurd messages from 68 WORLD LITERATURE TODAY reviews the state’s propaganda loudspeakers blaring their version of Jun Do’s story (presumably the state’s altered version of the biography written by the nameless state interrogator) as the...