general

Monica Ali's "Brick Lane" is an excellent debut novel that captures the struggles, the cultural clash, and the frustrations of a family caught between two worlds.

From the day of her birth, Nazneen is reminded how she is a puppet of fate. She dutifully leaves her small Bangladeshi village and goes to live in Brick Lane, the Bengali enclave of London, after her arranged marriage to Chanu, an educated but pompous and ineffectual man twice her age. She acts as a traditional, dutiful, and useful wife. After accepting whatever cards fate deals her, however, she casts a critical eye at the actions of her friends, her sister and her mother. She questions whether she can actually control her life. She starts to break free, first with small subtle acts of rebellion and then an affair. Finally, with the interests of her children in mind, she takes a giant step toward becoming her own woman. Interspersed throughout the story line are letters to Nazneen from her sister Hasina, who strikes out on her own in Bangladesh and, through good times and bad, forges a life of her own.

The writing style is colorful and descriptive. The reader can smell the spices wafting through the hallways, view the multicultural clutter of a shabby and overcrowded apartment, and share the confusion and outrage that simmer in Brick Lane due to cultural, religious, and racial prejudice. Each character is carefully crafted and brought to life. Ali peels back the surface layers of Chanu to reveal his inner doubts and disallusionment. The secondary characters such as the starchy Dr. Azad, the crafty hypochondriac Mrs. Islam, and the Britishized Razia, are depicted with a deft touch. There are only two points in the novel that could be improved upon. First, although the absent Hasina's letters add another dimension to the story by developing her personality and experiences, at one point they lead the reader off on a several year tangent that leaves a gap in Nazneen's time-line. Second, there are many ethnic words for food and clothing that are not explained, and these might cause the reader some confusion. Overall, however, this book is a seamless blend of the Old Country and the New, and it brings new insights to the immigrant experience.

The Strength of the Human Heart: Book Review of Brick Lane by Monica Ali, Scribner, 2003

This runaway British bestseller details the live of Nazeen, young Bengali woman transported to London as an arranged marriage nuptial.

Nazeen makes this book happen. She leads a host of supporting characters through daily life in their little slice of London life. Fleshing out the ranks behind her are: Razia, over-weight and self-absorbed; Chanu, the over-bearing bumpkin of a husband; Shahana, the shin-kicking teenage daughter, the brat whose neck you want to wring; Bibi, the loving, adoring and eager-to-please younger daughter; Hasina, the letter writing sister, and anchoring voice from her former home, Dhaka, Bengladesh; Ms. Islam, the stingy, hypochondriacal loanshark; Dr. Azad the learned doctor and unloved husband; Karim, the morally-upright, yet lustful, responsible yet irresponsible, handsome, virile, and available lover ...the list goes on. These characters spring to life in all of their various stages of non-linear, unpredictable complexity.

Through Nazeen's life, the reader gains access into London's Brick Lane where Bengalees has been transported. They are immigrants seeking the "better life". Their arrival is accompanied by cultural confusion and breakdown of traditional values. Their families are bombarded with drugs and other vicissitudes but in the end they learn the new ways, integrate new values into their lives and transform their identities.

As readers, we learn about the rural Bengaldesh of Nazeen's memory. She frequently returns to the land of her childhood, in dreams in fantasies, and in recollections, in her desire for things known. We are also shown the modern state of Bengaladesh as Chanu delivers sermons to his captive daughters and wife. We are driven into an English-Bengali life to then look out at white English people. Nazeen's unassuming anxiety about cultural clues gave me, a non-Bengali reader, insight into my own culture and cultural assumptions without having to travel to another land. It is unlikely that, even if I travelled to London or Dhaka, that I would have been privy to this life.

"But they were not aware of her. In the next instant she knew it. They could not see her any more than she could see God. They knew that she existed (just as she knew that He existed) but unless she did something, waved a gun, halted the traffic, they would not see her. She enjoyed this thought. She began to scrutinize. She stared at the long, thin faces, the pointy chins. The women had strange hair. It puffed up around their heads, pumped up like a snake's hood. They pressed their lips together and narrowed their eyes as though they were angry at something they had heard, or at the wind for messing their hair."

Our heroine is a woman that doesn't seem to know herself, just loves whom she loves, goes where she is sent, cooks what is expected that she cook. She changes, sometimes slowly, unassumingly and sometimes, rapidly and unexpectedly. She comes alive in her indecision, in her faith, in her lust, and in her confusion.

"Nazeen could not concentrate on her sewing. She watched the back of Karim's head, the strong lines his neck made. If she were to describe him to Hasina, what would she say?
That even when you knew you had not, you could end up believing you had said something that might change his life....She would say that he knew so many things. ...Chanu also knew many things but they only left him bewildered. If knowledge was food then while Karim grew strong on his intake, Chanu become only bloated, bilious, and pained. The made Karim made you feel was..."

She struggles with her faith, she is flawed, she has doen peculiar, idiosyncratic. For example, she has passed many hours in the night, standing at the kitchen counter eating, after her family is in bed; a thinking/non-thinking."For her, there was nothing else to be done. Nothing else that God wanted her to do. Sometimes she wanted to get up and run. Most of the time she did not want to run, but neither did she want to sit still. How difficult it was, this business of sitting still. But there was nothing really to complain of. There was Chanu, who was kind and never beat her. There was Raqib. And there was this shapeless, nameless thing that crawled across her shoulders and nested in her hair and poisoned her lungs, that made her both restless and listless."

This life goes-on-type of story lends strength to the human heart through the perseverance of the characters while holding the readers attention with like a spicy, aromatic, well-prepared dinner that will keep you reading through the night. The ending left me with the feeling of having gained more understanding about what it is to be human.

Wars occur. Deaths bring misery to families. Time moves on and the world changes. Amidst all this, love still occurs, no matter its fashion.

In Brick Lane, author Monica Ali presents the story of two Indian sisters as they seek love. Hasina elopes in a love marriage and seems to fall into love naturally while Nanzeen moves to London as part of an arranged marriage and waits for love to grow in her union. Throughout this modern-day love story, September 11 happens and the war on terrorism begins. What could be a story focused on the state of Indians during our current political climate, in fact becomes a tale of love. What is it and how does one find it?

Ali introduces, as a backdrop to her story, an accepted definition of love by Indian elders. "There are two kinds of love. The kind that starts off big and slowly wears away, that seems you can never use it up and then one day is finished. And the kind that you don't notice at first, but which adds a little bit to itself every day, like an oyster makes a pearl, grain by grain, a jewel from the sand."

Brick Lane starts out seemingly as propaganda for the merits of arranged marriages. Nanzeen marries Chanu, a much older, unattractive man who is pompous and long-winded. However, Chanu provides for her and treats her kindly. Nanzeen first views her husband in disgust as she grooms him and his home. Eventually though, she finds comfort in the stability in her life and wonder if what she feels for him is love.

Hasina flees her home in Bangladesh to marry her love, writing to her sister that, "We have love. Love is happiness. I feel to run and jump like goat." That love soon fizzles, however, and Hasina flees that home and finds herself on the go for many years.

Communicating via letters, the sisters exchange accounts of their lives: new children, the deaths of children, new jobs and friends, etc. Both seem to share in questioning, "Have I found love? Is this what love is?" Both do not come to the same conclusion. The answers they find effect their life decisions and ultimately the happiness and freedom they find in life.
Ali brings a surprising story in Brick Lane by not writing a clichéd story of either love or the life of an Indian woman. Instead she confronts real issues and does so in a way that may leave the reader disagreeing with her or the character's decisions. In writing her story in this way, she introduces people to new ideas the realities facing many (Indian) women today.