Posted on Sun, Jun. 25, 2006

Silence speaks volumes in a Portuguese village

Reviewed by Gaiutra Bahadur

Monica Ali's debut novel, Brick Lane, won her kudos and condemnation. She earned the kudos for gracefully telling the undertold stories of Bangladeshi immigrants in London. The condemnation came from some of those very immigrants, who denounced her portrayal of their community as "insulting and shameful."

Ali's second book removes the Dhaka-born, British-raised writer from the spotlight - and the crosshairs - of her ethnic background.

Alentejo Blue unfolds in Portuguese cork-tree country - nowhere near Dhaka, or its outpost on Brick Lane. And, if Ali has any literary debt to pay, it's not to Salman Rushdie, Anita Desai, or any other South Asian writing in English.

Ali evokes the village of Mamarrosa the way the American novelist Sherwood Anderson did the town of Winesburg, Ohio, in 1919 - with spare prose, through interior monologues built on a foundation of silence.

In the quietly lyrical opening chapter, an octogenarian named João finds the body of his friend Rui hanging from the mossy branch of a cork tree. As he cuts down and cradles the body, the arc of their friendship and its erotic subtext emerges through flashbacks.

Fishing by the riverbank one day, Rui, the agitator for workers' rights, questions João about conditions at his factory. He wants to know whether the barracks bring men closer. João, who knows what species of furtive closeness the barracks promote, does not want to talk about it. He barks, "No."

" 'All right,' said Rui. 'Let's be quiet, then. We are not afraid of silence.' "

In nine spare chapters, Ali tests that declaration. She introduces us to village regulars who must cope with silences loaded with the baggage of relationships, mortality and God.

At the end of a long day, Vasco, the cartoonishly fat cafe owner, meditates by himself on a question of great moment: Should he eat an almond pastry, or not? Memories of his life in America - and the death of his wife in childbirth - crop up in the vast pauses around that question.

Chrissie, the mother of a family of slovenly English transplants, seems at first to have given up the fight against dirt, chaos and despair. One character describes her as a "dishcloth." Her husband is an alcoholic. Her daughter, Ruby, is the town tramp. A writer has an affair with her, but primarily because he is bored and in search of material.

Still, the mother dutifully takes the daughter for an abortion, illegal in Portugal, and is kicked out by her husband for the deed. In her banishment, there is nothing to do but listen to the rain and reflect, in a stream of consciousness.

In Alentejo Blue, the characters in dialogue with themselves matter more than their interactions with one another. And, despite the dramatic details of affairs and a criminal abortion, characters matter more than the plot.

If anything, Mamarrosa is the kind of place that annihilates plot. Nothing much happens, except for the schemes of the young to escape its nothingness, and the bargains made by the old, who no longer desire escape.

That nothingness provides the central tension of the book, symbolized by a clock that drives Teresa, a 20-year-old longing to break free of the village, absolutely mad.

It's stuck at 20 past 3, the clock hands as immobile to her as all of Mamarrosa, with its Internet cafe where the computers don't work.

Gaiutra Bahadur is an Inquirer staff writer. Her essay about growing up immigrant in Jersey City will be published next summer in the anthology "Living on the Edge: New Jersey Writers Take on the Garden State."

Disconnected story a mosaic with pieces missing

Ali abandons insight, style that made her first novel a success

By Jessica Slater, Special to the News

June 16, 2006

With the success of her first novel, Brick Lane, Monica Ali was lauded as a great new writer on the British literary scene. The novel portrayed the lives of Muslim immigrants living in London's East End. Not only was it beautifully written, but it provided thoughtful and timely insight into contemporary multiculturalism, a theme at the forefront of the post 9-11 mindset.

Ali's second novel, Alentejo Blue, is set in Mamarrosa, a fictional town in rural Portugal. Of course, Ali is under no obligation to continue producing fiction to supplement our understanding of current events, but this novel takes her about as far from the pulse as she could go.

The style of the novel is also very different. Brick Lane was instantly engaging, a rich family saga with compelling, memorable characters. Alentejo Blue is sleepy and disconnected, as are its characters.

The chapters are almost stories in themselves (but not quite); the characters drift in and out of each other's lives by choice or accident. The narrative confidence of Brick Lane is diluted into something more detached and reflective, meandering through different points of view to present fragments of these intersecting lives.

Among the characters are members of families that have been rooted in Mamarrosa for generations, living alongside expats and tourists passing through. Everyone seems to be somewhere on a trajectory of escape. What they are escaping to or from seems irrelevant; the common thread is the movement in people's lives, literal or desired.

The shifting points of view contribute to the sense of characters deeply caught up in their own thought processes. When the struggling writer, Stanton, sneaks intimate moments with first the mother, then the daughter, of the eccentric Potts family, Stanton justifies his actions to himself and that seems to be all that matters. Even when the husband finds out, his anger quickly subsides. Nobody seems to care too much about the here and now.

It's as if Ali forgets to keep the cameras rolling on the action: we get disjointed thoughts from various characters, but the consequences of their actions don't play out, and the relationships between them don't seem to develop any depth.

Ali provides very little description of the local scenery and very little to engage the reader with the place. The result is a feeling that this book is about what isn't there - the places we long for, the dreams we entertain, the memories we hold close.

Even the author's note states what the book is not: "This is neither a history book nor a travel book, but only a work of fiction."

As in Brick Lane, Ali explores the themes of culture, authenticity and belonging. But there is an overarching heaviness that hangs over this book. Teresa, a young woman who works in a local store and dreams of going to London to work as an au pair, is questioning her own dream before it has even materialized. As she sits in the newly opened Internet cafe, she seems trapped by her own inertia:

"The café had been open three hours, and already it felt like it had been there forever. Although the door and one window stood open, the air was thick as paste and compromised by fish. The walls were a valiant shade of green, but on them hung last year's calendar and a stupid painting of a bullfight. It was an Internet café without the Internet, and nobody expected any better. People took up their places, the old ones at the bar, the younger ones at the table, as if no other course were possible, and this sense, this weary inevitability, pressed down on her and made her yawn."

Some beautiful and sensitive writing lurks in the pages of this novel, but overall, something is missing. The idea of generating drama from intersecting lives is becoming a cliché these days. Throwing contrasting characters together can certainly yield interesting results, but it's no substitute for story.

And in the end, that's what seems to be missing: the tension, momentum and shape that make a good story come alive. The most tangible source of momentum is provided by the anticipated return of a character named Marco, who is coming home after 20 years and a successful business career. But the anticipation is so low-key, I had to go back and remind myself who Marco was as his return approached. The final scenes of his arrival feel more like an excuse to bring the characters together and spark some kind of climax, but there's not enough tension or energy in the air for the spark to ignite.

Certainly Brick Lane is a tough act to follow. From the first page, the characters take shape and the story takes hold, and as a reader you have no doubt why you are reading: It's a story that wants to be told. In contrast, Alentejo Blue feels uncertain and ungrounded. Before you get a chance to feel connected to anything, the focus shifts, the characters slip out of view. Ali took a risk in trying something so different, but it just seems her heart wasn't in it.

Jessica Slater is assistant interactive editor for technology at the Rocky Mountain News.

The Sidney Morning Herald

Alentejo Blue

Andrew Riemer, reviewer

June 3, 2006
 

Monica Ali has a sharp eye for her characters' tics and quirks.

Author

Monica Ali

Genre

Fiction

Publisher

Doubleday

Pages

297

Anyone hoping that Monica Ali's second book would be a re-run of the spectacularly successful Brick Lane will be disappointed. There is a great temptation nowadays for writers such as Ali, who was born in Bangladesh and grew up in England, to let themselves be typecast. I am sure she could have written what many - perhaps even her publishers - might have expected of her: another tale of Asian immigrant life in contemporary Britain. Instead, she has turned her back on Tower Hamlets in the East End of London to explore an entirely different landscape.

Alentejo Blue is set in an impoverished southern province of Portugal - the "blue" of the title seems to refer to a shade of the colour unique to the region - that has remained all but untouched by the waves of holidaymakers and tourists that have been washing over the Iberian peninsula for decades.

The first chapter in particular is a tour de force. An old man, Joao, sits by the body of his lifelong friend Rui, whom he found hanging from a branch of a 200-year-old cork tree. As Joao's thoughts float from the present to the experiences (some of them deeply secret) that he shared with Rui, Ali gives her readers a deft, impressionistic lesson in the history of Portugal during the 20th century.

Only relatively recently has the nation - still the poorest in Western Europe - begun to recover from the repression and stagnation of the 40-year rule of the dictator Salazar that began in 1928. Not as notorious as Franco, the strongman next door, Salazar also persecuted socialists, communists and other undesirables and forged strong links with a hidebound, ultraconservative church hierarchy. It was for those reasons that the waggish journalist Bernard Levin, writing in the early 1960s, dubbed Portugal Britain's oldest and dirtiest ally.

Ali sketches the horrors of the Salazar years with a light but telling touch as Joao contemplates his friend's corpse. Her writing is assured and all the more moving and disturbing for its restraint. But at heart Alentejo Blue is concerned with the present, not the past.

The inhabitants of Mamarrosa, the small town where most of the novel is set, are not much intent on politics and for many of them (as Joao remarks at one point) Portugal's dark past is no more than a dim memory at best. They worry about the future and about their prospects, particularly whether the return of Marco Alfonso Rodrigues, who is reputed to have made a vast fortune abroad, will bring prosperity to the town in the shape of hotels, resorts and shopping malls. Some - like Teresa, a young woman caught between the demands of traditional life and the blandishments of the contemporary world - dream of escape to London or Paris or New York.

The contrast between the placid or at least stoic elderly inhabitants of Mamarrosa and the restless young, who show themselves willing to break the iron rules of custom, tradition and religious precept, generates many fine pages.

Nevertheless, Ali places her main emphasis on a gaggle of Britons: expatriates, drop-outs and tourists whose paths occasionally cross. Most vivid among these is a family named Potts. They have left England because of some vague, undisclosed indiscretion on the part of the paterfamilias, "China" to his friends, a gross creature with lax ethical and hygiene standards. His wife, Chrissie, has a brief, unsatisfactory affair with a writer named Harry Stanton, an unpleasant character, who has come to Mamarrosa to find a refuge where he might finish his magnum opus on William Blake.

Their teenage daughter Ruby - she of the clumsy, old-fashioned hearing-aid - manages to get herself pregnant in a country where abortions remain outlawed. Jay, Ruby's younger brother, is well on the way to going native, as his parents would say.

This - essentially the central strand of the novel - is surrounded by the stories of other transient Britons, all of whom, one way or another, come to experience the impact of the landscape and the people of Alentejo. Eileen, a middle-aged Englishwoman married to an opinionated though well-meaning bore, succumbs to the romantic urge to spend the rest of her days in Mamarrosa. Huw and Sophie, young London sophisticates on a pre-wedding holiday, discover that their relationship is found wanting as they travel the countryside, inspecting ghoulish chapels constructed from human bones and skulls, and observing the customs of the country.

Ali has a sharp eye for her characters' tics and quirks and a splendid ear for dialogue, at least where her English speakers are concerned. She runs into difficulties, of course, when rendering her Portuguese characters' speech. On the whole she manages well enough, but, inevitably I suppose, these people tend to sound a bit too much like Londoners; this is especially true of younger people, such as Teresa, her lovers and her friends.

The last chapter draws together the novel's rather loose strands (somewhat in the manner of As You Like It) at an outdoor party where most conflicts are resolved - sometimes less, rather than more satisfactorily. There, as once or twice earlier in the book, I felt certain misgivings.

Ali's villagers and townsfolk carry on in a quaintly comical fashion that brought to mind the "funny little foreigners" mindset of old British films and of the BBC's celebrated April Fool hoax about Italy's spaghetti harvest - not to forget Manuel from Barcelona. Occasionally, Ali is rather patronising towards her Portuguese characters.

None of that should hinder readers from enjoying this bright, frequently thoughtful novel in which the author of Brick Lane demonstrates an old but often forgotten truth: it's how well you write, not what you write about, that matters most. One day, perhaps, Ali will return to the subject matter of her first, highly acclaimed book. In the meantime, her new novel reveals the scope of her considerable talent.

The contrast between the placid or at least stoic elderly inhabitants of Mamarrosa and the restless young, who show themselves willing to break the iron rules of custom, tradition and religious precept, generates many fine pages.

Nevertheless, Ali places her main emphasis on a gaggle of Britons: expatriates, drop-outs and tourists whose paths occasionally cross. Most vivid among these is a family named Potts. They have left England because of some vague, undisclosed indiscretion on the part of the paterfamilias, "China" to his friends, a gross creature with lax ethical and hygiene standards. His wife, Chrissie, has a brief, unsatisfactory affair with a writer named Harry Stanton, an unpleasant character, who has come to Mamarrosa to find a refuge where he might finish his magnum opus on William Blake.

Their teenage daughter Ruby - she of the clumsy, old-fashioned hearing-aid - manages to get herself pregnant in a country where abortions remain outlawed. Jay, Ruby's younger brother, is well on the way to going native, as his parents would say.

This - essentially the central strand of the novel - is surrounded by the stories of other transient Britons, all of whom, one way or another, come to experience the impact of the landscape and the people of Alentejo. Eileen, a middle-aged Englishwoman married to an opinionated though well-meaning bore, succumbs to the romantic urge to spend the rest of her days in Mamarrosa. Huw and Sophie, young London sophisticates on a pre-wedding holiday, discover that their relationship is found wanting as they travel the countryside, inspecting ghoulish chapels constructed from human bones and skulls, and observing the customs of the country.

Ali has a sharp eye for her characters' tics and quirks and a splendid ear for dialogue, at least where her English speakers are concerned. She runs into difficulties, of course, when rendering her Portuguese characters' speech. On the whole she manages well enough, but, inevitably I suppose, these people tend to sound a bit too much like Londoners; this is especially true of younger people, such as Teresa, her lovers and her friends.

The last chapter draws together the novel's rather loose strands (somewhat in the manner of As You Like It) at an outdoor party where most conflicts are resolved - sometimes less, rather than more satisfactorily. There, as once or twice earlier in the book, I felt certain misgivings.

Ali's villagers and townsfolk carry on in a quaintly comical fashion that brought to mind the "funny little foreigners" mindset of old British films and of the BBC's celebrated April Fool hoax about Italy's spaghetti harvest - not to forget Manuel from Barcelona. Occasionally, Ali is rather patronising towards her Portuguese characters.

None of that should hinder readers from enjoying this bright, frequently thoughtful novel in which the author of Brick Lane demonstrates an old but often forgotten truth: it's how well you write, not what you write about, that matters most. One day, perhaps, Ali will return to the subject matter of her first, highly acclaimed book. In the meantime, her new novel reveals the scope of her considerable talent.

Monica Ali's path diverges from `Brick Lane'

Alentejo Blue
By Monica Ali
Scribner, 226 pages, $24

Nothing seems more at odds with the go-getting, opportunity-seizing American sensibility than the notion that inertia could be the most powerful force in one's life. Anton Chekhov, the high priest of listlessness, generated an entire theatrical body of work out of stalled lives, thwarted desires and soul-crushing boredom. But who in the theater these days doesn't want to grab his three sisters by their languorous necks and scream, "For God sakes, just go to Moscow already!"

It is a brave move on the part of Monica Ali to follow up "Brick Lane," her hugely successful and solidly conventional first novel about the immigrant struggles and strivings of a Bangladeshi family in East London, with a fragmented, polyphonic, chiefly static narrative. It features characters who don't do much other than pine--for professional success, for sustaining companionship, for a fresh start, for what could have been. The plot of one chapter revolves around a portly cafe owner sadly contemplating his last remaining almond tart. Spoon poised, he agonizes over whether to eat it as he cycles through the highlights and disappointments in his life.

It's not that "Alentejo Blue," which unfolds as a series of linked vignettes set in a village in a poor agricultural region of Portugal, is wholly devoid of event. It opens with a suicide and moves on to adultery, an illegal abortion, a murder charge and the much-anticipated (but ultimately anticlimactic) return of a native son who has struck it rich. These bits of plot, however, feel decidedly peripheral; they function mainly as pegs on which the characters' interior lives are hung. Like all books that ask the reader to dwell in a character's mind, the challenge facing "Alentejo Blue" is that its motley assemblage of voices be distinct and arresting enough to offset the lack of momentum. And for the most part they are.

In a departure from the tight narrative focus of "Brick Lane"--which centered on Nazneen, a young Bangladeshi woman who enters into an arranged marriage and gradually discovers her strength--in "Alentejo Blue" Ali embraces a broad range of character types and perspectives, demonstrating admirable versatility and emotional range. Among the denizens of Mamarrosa, her fictional village, are an English writer in hibernation, a washed-up expat family, two couples on vacation (one in the twilight of married life, one just engaged), the cafe owner, an old-timer harboring a secret and an energetic local girl, Teresa, with big ambitions and an au pair job lined up in London.

The chapter devoted to Teresa acts as a kind of centerpiece. She is the epitome of cheerful industry, supplementing her day job at the general store with house calls to sell life insurance in the evenings--a juxtaposition that underlines the tension between the old way of life and the new. This is one of the book's themes, and Ali generally serves it up with a dash of humor. When the village's entrepreneurial minds decide to open an Internet cafe, they do it in an old frozen-fish shop that still smells, and people seem more interested in the cafe aspect than in an Internet connection. The only news that connectivity brings is a middle-of-the night Webcam image of a deserted street somewhere in Canada, where even less is happening than in Mamarrosa.

Teresa prides herself on her keen powers of observation, and feels that she's wilting in sleepy Mamarrosa. "It was all very well, she thought, to be alert. But what was there to see?" But even in a provincial village, where nothing ever changes and people are predictable to the point of becoming caricatures of themselves, things aren't always what they seem. Teresa may be sharp and open to new experiences, but she's just as blind as everyone else to what's bubbling beneath the surface. Joao is one of the village old-timers who are daily fixtures at the bar. He lives quietly in a one-room shack without electricity and reserves his affections for a pet pig. On a visit to deliver his groceries, Teresa--with her text-messaging cell phone and a flurry of worldly concerns--takes for granted his simple, carefree existence and imagines a long-deceased wife. How surprised she would be to learn that the great unrequited love of his life was a man.

And then there's Vasco, the fat cafe owner, trained in the restaurant business in Provincetown, Mass., who likes to spout off about the superiority of the United States. But does anyone wonder why he came back? Does anyone know that he had a wife there who died in childbirth?

In its unassuming way, by contrasting an individual's private voice with the passing impressions of other characters, "Alentejo Blue" drives home how little we can tell about someone from their social persona--the bluster and battiness and assorted ticks and postures that people habitually don when they step out into the world. Ali is unsparing in diagnosing weakness and hypocrisy, but she's also deeply generous. She grants even seemingly limited individuals a measure of insight and an unexpected eloquence.

Like Chrissie Potts, who's trapped in a toxic marriage and comes off as meek, uneducated and slightly tawdry. Her hearing-impaired and promiscuous teenage daughter, Ruby, has become something of a village joke, and her attention-starved son befriends a fellow expat, the unsavory Harry Stanton, a novelist who uses and summarily discards every member of the Potts family. When Ruby gets pregnant and Chrissie arranges for an under-the-table abortion, Chrissie's world collapses. The prospect of spending time in jail actually seems like a relief:

"All this business of what to do next, how to do it, when to do it, why you're doing it. Well, they take that off you, don't they? . . . You don't have to pretend anymore about pushing on, going somewhere. You just have to serve your time. Isn't that what we're doing anyway?"

Chrissie's story is one of two chapters written in the first person. The other introduces Eileen, an older British lady who could have wandered over from an Anita Brookner novel. She has come to Mamarrosa on holiday with her curmudgeonly, know-it-all husband and fancies sticking around:

"I could be one of those Englishwomen with fat ankles and capillaried cheeks and hair coming down from under a tattered hat who set up in places like this, to keep bees or grow runner beans or save donkeys. I could ride into town on a donkey, barefoot on a donkey with a wicker shopping basket, and everyone would know me and say in a fond sort of way, ah, there she goes, the crazy Englishwoman."

Eileen and Chrissie represent two versions of the foreigner experience: the tourist with her romanticized notions about how authentic and freeing life in Mamarrosa could be, and the disillusioned expat who's all too familiar with the barriers erected by an insular community and knows the folly of trying to flee your troubles. Troubles tend to stick to you wherever you go, and swapping your Citroen for a donkey isn't likely to change that.

With its shifting perspectives, sketchily drawn back stories and loose ends, "Alentejo Blue" is a very different reading experience from "Brick Lane," which could be a bit ponderous and single-minded in its handling of its subject matter. "Alentejo Blue" may not be a perfectly tidy package, but it's lighter on its feet. And although in the end it doesn't quite distill broader meaning from its medley of voices, the voices are vivid and resonant, and there's no question that it's a more structurally ambitious, more nuanced, more interesting book. Don't pack it in your beach tote, perhaps, but certainly set it aside for fall.

Monica Ali paints 'Alentejo Blue' a bit less brilliantly than 'Brick Lane'

Updated 7/6/2006 8:12 AM ET

By Susan Kelly, USA TODAY

Monica Ali's 2003 debut novel, Brick Lane, would be a hard act for anyone to follow. While the book was still in manuscript form, Ali was hailed as one of the best novelists of her generation.

Reviewers praised the compassion and insight that Ali, born in Bangladesh and raised in England, brought to her tale about a Bangladeshi family in London.

She leaves the confines of that community for a village in the Alentejo region of Portugal.

While the Brick Lane characters are strangers in a strange land, the people in tiny Mamarrosa are often strangers in their own land, estranged from one another and from their dreams of what life should offer them.

Alentejo Blue is a solid successor to Ali's debut, but not one that is likely to make her the literary "it" girl this time.