The title refers to the shop run by Zaki Khalil in London — a place that embodies both the dreams and disappointments of a man who left his native country in his youth, but now, staring old age squarely in the face, finds himself doing the same things and being the same person he tried to run away from.
It is this sense of a missed life that draws Zaki to an illicit affair — with his bored, midlife crisis-battling daughter-in-law Delphine. Set in the heart of multiracial London, a territory made immensely recognisable by such writers as Salman Rushdie, Hanif Kureishi and Zadie Smith, Corner Shop tackles familiar themes of exile and the grip of the past in a new and invigorating fashion.
Each of the characters in the Khalil household — Lucky, the football-loving grandson; Jinan, the hardworking lawyer; and Zaki’s son, who does not know that his trophy French wife hides a terrible secret; and Zaki and Delphine themselves — is etched with remarkable wit and humanity. This is a more nuanced work than Bitter Sweets, Farooki’s debut, which also tackles continent-hopping souls. Corner Shop is an important signpost heralding a rapidly advancing talent.
CORNER SHOP Roopa Farooki
St Martin’s Press
368 pages
$24.95
State of mind
Norah Vincent first achieved fame for dressing and living as a man for 18-odd months and writing about her exploits in Self-Made Man. The writing of that book, and the double life that preceded it, were so taxing they drove Vincent to depression. Her first trip to a mental institution gave Vincent, being who she is, the idea for another book that would chronicle the state of mental health institutions in America.
So began Vincent’s voluntary confinement to three different mental hospitals: Meriwether, a jaw-droppingly depressing facility in New York City; St Luke’s, a make-do private asylum in the Midwest; and Mobius, a five-star retreat in the South.
More From This Section
Vincent’s account flits from the journalistic to the deeply personal (at Mobius, she finally came to terms with childhood abuse). She is expectedly damning of the assembly-line nature of mental hospitals in which doctors are keen to categorise patients into neat subheads so as to depersonalise the line of treatment.
Equally, the big pharmaceutical companies, which spend millions of dollars on bettering habit-forming drugs such as Prozac, come in her line of fire. This is a serious subject; however, Vincent’s smart-alecky writing style, which perfectly suited her fun drag king experiment, precipitously verges on the disingenuous.
VOLUNTARY MADNESS
MY YEAR LOST AND FOUND IN THE LOONY BIN
Norah Vincent
Viking/Penguin
287 pages
$25.95
London talking
To be read aloud to by a person of quality is a privilege. Usually after childhood it doesn’t happen again, unless you buy yourself an audiobook (or your adolescence was marked by poetry).
But here’s a masterful reading you don’t have to pay for (or squirm through). On the Daily Telegraph’s website, Alexander McCall Smith has been laying out a novel in instalments. Corduroy Mansions, his first “online novel”, is about the lives of the occupants of a seedy London apartment building. The 100th and final chapter was posted recently.
The text is read by Andrew Sachs, who played Manuel in Fawlty Towers. Listening to the novel in his voice, you can hear the pauses, changes in tone, the chuckles that don’t quite erupt but are still legible. You can download the whole thing in mp3 files.
The other novel thing is that the readers commented on each chapter as the book grew, and McCall Smith took their comments into account — notably by giving more snout-time to Freddie de la Hay, the popular dog.
This is not in the league of his Mma Ramotswe stories, but it is good for some of the same reasons: this is a small and intimate society in which things happen. “I would like to continue, and I think I shall,” said the author. We haven’t heard the last of these characters.
CORDUROY MANSIONS
Alexander McCall Smith
Free text and mp3
on the UK Daily Telegraph
website
