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johndiconsiglio's review against another edition
4.0
Warning: Family Life is slim, but it ain’t light. An immigrant fairy tale turned nightmare. An Indian family barely arrives in Queens before a horrible tragedy strikes one son. No longer just strangers-in-a-strange-land, their grief makes them strangers to each other. Engrossing, unnerving and brilliantly unrelenting in its detail. Semi-autobiographical, the author reportedly spent 12 years honing its 200 pages. His effort to get every painful word right paid off. Recalls James Agee’s wonderful A Death in the Family. But there’s precious little light at the end of this tunnel.
tonytharakan's review against another edition
5.0
This 2015 Folio prize-winning novel is an often unnerving read about an emigrant Indian family trying to attain the American dream. "Family Life" is part-novel part-memoir and we are moved by the plight of young Ajay, whose world collapses around him after an accident leaves his brother brain-damaged. A powerful portrait of a dysfunctional family. Highly recommended. But do keep a funny book handy to help you beat the blues.
cdehlert's review against another edition
2.0
Rather boring book about a family that immigrates to the US from India. The older son has a swimming accident and becomes brain damaged. I just couldn't get interested in this book.
stevienlcf's review against another edition
4.0
In this autobiographical novel set in the late 1970s, Ajay and his older brother, Birju, are looking forward to leaving Delhi and joining their father in Queens, New York. Birju, the vessel of his family’s ambitions, is selected to attend a prestigious high school, but tragedy strikes in the form of a calamitous swimming pool accident that leaves Birju brain dead. Ajay’s dream of receiving a gift of a baby tiger in America is replaced by hospital and nursing home visits, cans of Isocal formula and feeding tubes, latex gloves, nurses aides, and “miracle workers.” As his father seeks refuge in alcohol and his mother becomes increasingly irrational and inattentive, Ajay (momentarily thrilled with the prospect of becoming an only child) struggles to navigate a world in which he is alone in his despair. Sharma is particularly skilled at capturing how Ajay is pulled by duty, but longs for happiness. Although the first half of the novel holds most of the book’s momentum, there is enough intensity to sustain the second half through its unsettled conclusion. Sharma has written a heartbreaking novel that is even more poignant as it mirrors his own life.
readingwithhippos's review against another edition
4.0
Last night as I was trying to fall asleep, I found myself mulling over this book and its gut-punch of an ending.
(I also spent some time reflecting on Anna Kendrick's meteoric rise in the world of musical films and speculating as to whom she would play in a reboot of Rent, ultimately concluding that she's too fresh-faced and innocent to be cast as anyone but Mark, can't you just picture her in the scarf and glasses, now that's a production I'd like to see, but that's neither here nor there.)
Family Life isn't pleasant to read, particularly. The story is thick with tragedy and guilt and the cruelty of blind chance, and the terse voice of the narrator is at times unbearably blunt. But if the best fiction can tell a story, even a terrible story, and through it somehow reveal something true, truer than the actual depressing truth that's on the local news every night at six o'clock on the dot, then Akhil Sharma has written some damn good fiction.
Narrator Ajay and his older brother Birju move with their parents from India to the US in the 1970s. At first their main concern is adjusting to their new home and making connections with other Indian immigrants, but after Birju suffers a tragic accident, everything changes for the Mishra family. Sharma's prose is spare to the point of childishness, but somehow within those short sentences he's able to capture a stunning array of emotions. The shock of entering a new culture, the bereftness of realizing home is gone forever, the soul-crushing guilt of being the brother who survived childhood unscathed, the suffocating obligation to be a high achiever without taking credit for any accomplishments—it's all here, and it rocked me to my core.
And have I mentioned the ending? Yowza. Sometimes quiet, meditative books like this one are only a slow unraveling of misfortune, and at the end of the roll there's just a brown cardboard tube—no revelation or meaning, however slight. Without giving anything away, Sharma's chosen ending is devastatingly phrased, and just ambiguous enough that it will linger in my brain crannies for a long, long time.
More book recommendations by me at www.readingwithhippos.com
(I also spent some time reflecting on Anna Kendrick's meteoric rise in the world of musical films and speculating as to whom she would play in a reboot of Rent, ultimately concluding that she's too fresh-faced and innocent to be cast as anyone but Mark, can't you just picture her in the scarf and glasses, now that's a production I'd like to see, but that's neither here nor there.)
Family Life isn't pleasant to read, particularly. The story is thick with tragedy and guilt and the cruelty of blind chance, and the terse voice of the narrator is at times unbearably blunt. But if the best fiction can tell a story, even a terrible story, and through it somehow reveal something true, truer than the actual depressing truth that's on the local news every night at six o'clock on the dot, then Akhil Sharma has written some damn good fiction.
Narrator Ajay and his older brother Birju move with their parents from India to the US in the 1970s. At first their main concern is adjusting to their new home and making connections with other Indian immigrants, but after Birju suffers a tragic accident, everything changes for the Mishra family. Sharma's prose is spare to the point of childishness, but somehow within those short sentences he's able to capture a stunning array of emotions. The shock of entering a new culture, the bereftness of realizing home is gone forever, the soul-crushing guilt of being the brother who survived childhood unscathed, the suffocating obligation to be a high achiever without taking credit for any accomplishments—it's all here, and it rocked me to my core.
And have I mentioned the ending? Yowza. Sometimes quiet, meditative books like this one are only a slow unraveling of misfortune, and at the end of the roll there's just a brown cardboard tube—no revelation or meaning, however slight. Without giving anything away, Sharma's chosen ending is devastatingly phrased, and just ambiguous enough that it will linger in my brain crannies for a long, long time.
More book recommendations by me at www.readingwithhippos.com
palomapepper's review against another edition
1.0
Clipped, boring writing style. Short declarative sentences, with little variation. It gets old, really fast.
It's an autobiographical story, so when the narrator compares his own writing to Hemingway's, here I am rolling my eyes: “As long as I wrote about exotic things, I thought, then I could be a not very good writer and still be successful.” UGH. Just writing a story for "success", not aiming for quality in story and prose. WHY BOTHER.
Also: every character is unpleasant, and not even in an interesting way. The story is an unrelenting cascade of miseries, without a real sense of plot driving it forward.
Not sure why I finished this.
It's an autobiographical story, so when the narrator compares his own writing to Hemingway's, here I am rolling my eyes: “As long as I wrote about exotic things, I thought, then I could be a not very good writer and still be successful.” UGH. Just writing a story for "success", not aiming for quality in story and prose. WHY BOTHER.
Also: every character is unpleasant, and not even in an interesting way. The story is an unrelenting cascade of miseries, without a real sense of plot driving it forward.
Not sure why I finished this.
kittykornerlibrarian's review against another edition
3.0
This is the story of a family that emigrates from India to the United States, finding unexpected tragedy in their new American life. It's told in first person from the younger son's point of view. I found it oddly powerful, even though the pacing was uneven, especially at the end which felt very rushed.