Book Review: A Season in Delhi by Scott Alexander Hess

Reviewer: Alan Chin

Publisher: Rebel Satori Press (Nov, 2023)

Pages: 129

Rating:★★★★★

Coming Soon - November 12, 2023 from Rebel Satori Press

 

New Yorkers Brant and Lloyd settle into a posh neighborhood in Delhi to live while Lloyd works a new job that transplanted them to India. While Lloyd travels the country for his business, Brant is left alone much of the time with only a servant to keep him company. During his solitary time, Brant discovers the diary of a former diplomat’s wife, which chronicles her torrid affair with an Indian hoodlum. As Brant reads Carol’s scandalous tale of daring and woe, he can’t help bonding with this lady because of his own infidelity. The more Brant reads Carol’s diary, the greater the attachment he feels with this woman, and the greater his curiosity grows to find out what happened to her. They become kindred souls, sharing feelings and emotions across time. His journey thru Carol’s past beautifully creates a bond that transcends time and culture, empathy and absolution.

 

This is a tale of temptation, infidelity, loss, and redemption. But ultimately, it is a taut story of crushing loneliness and the fragility of human connections. It also delves into the desperate need we feel to cling to anything that lessens that loneliness. The characters are brutally authentic, and Hess handles them with sympathy and honesty. The reader so easily feels compassion, even becomes them as they face morally difficult choices. 

 

The author asks the reader to delve deeply into the human nature of illicit love affairs, those complex feelings of yearning, guilt, excitement, pleasure, fulfillment, wonder, and possibly even regret.

 

With sparse prose, Hess describes the sensual feel of Delhi and Agra. I have visited these fascinating destinations many times, and I can justly say the author took me back there, so rich and true were his descriptions. This is a quick read, but one that resonates in the heart. I treasured each page of this story.

Book Review: I was Better Last Night by Harvey Fierstein

Reviewer: Alan Chin

Publisher: Knopf (Mar, 2020)

Pages: 400

Rating:★★★★★

 

Harvey Fierstein’s career began at community theater in Brooklyn and then advanced to the experimental Andy Warhol theater company where Harvey was encouraged to let his eccentric, nonconforming inner-being thrive. And he did just that. Working with Warhol’s Theatre of the Ridiculous company, Harvey honed both his acting and writing skills, which propelled him to write and perform his first mega hit, Torch Song Trilogy. Torch Song started as three separate plays, but was later combined into one moving play for an off Broadway run. Torch Song’s success thrust Harvey into the big time, winning him the first of four Tony awards. 

 

I was, of course, aware that Harvey Fierstein wrote and performed Torch Song on Broadway and made a Hollywood movie, because that movie changed the way I saw myself, a young gay man who was looking for a long-term, monogamous relationship. That movie showed me that there were other gay men who wanted the same thing, and that it was possible to find that. 

 

What I wasn’t aware of, because I’ve never been a theater person, was the extraordinary career of Mr. Fierstein. Torch Song was only the first of a string of hit Broadway plays. He wrote the playbooks and performed Hairspray, Fiddler on the Roof, La Cage Aux Folles (which won him his second Tony), Newsies, and Kinky Boots. I had no idea Fierstein was such a giant of the stage. 

 

But this book is not only about Harvey’s career. He describes his personal struggles and conflicts, his romances and sex during the AIDS crises, his decades of addiction, and the rich New York gay culture of the seventies and eighties. 

 

I loved this read. Its pages are filled with the wisdom which comes from living a bewilderingly colorful life. It’s the most entertaining book I’ve read in years. 

 

I Was Better Last Night is and engaging, outrageously funny triumph.

Book Review: Shuggie Baine by Douglas Stuart

 

Reviewer: Alan Chin
Publisher: Grove Press (Oct, 2020)

Pages: 448

Rating:★★★★★

Shuggie Bain is the story of a lonely boy growing up gay in a run-down public housing area of 1980s Glasgow, Scotland. His broken family, due in large part to his alcoholic mother, is on the dole and trying to survive the mother’s destructive lifestyle. Shuggie’s mother, Agnes, dreams of a better life, a life of money and love and beautiful things, but her drinking only digs her and her children deeper into debt and misery. Shuggie is the youngest of three children, and the only one who accepts and tolerates his mother. He understands his mother because he is very much like her—someone who takes pride in her looks while all of her peers ridicule her. He does everything he can to keep Agnes going, hoping that someday his philandering taxi-driving father will return to lift them up into a better life. But as Agnes increasingly finds solace in drink, the older children abandon their home to find their own way, leaving Shuggie to care for his mother as her alcoholic binges bring on more destructive mood swings. Agnes is supportive of her son, even knowing the boy is gay. But her addiction eclipses everyone around her, including Shuggie.

 

A distressing story of surviving in an unsympathetic world where addiction, betrayal, sexuality, loneliness, and love assault you every day. Shuggie Bain is a portrayal of a working-class, dysfunctional family that is rarely seen in fiction. It is a searing debut by a talented novelist who tells an honest and powerful story.

 

I loved and hated this story. It is a heartbreaking tale that kept reminding me of my own lonely dysfunctional childhood, bringing up one painful memory after another. And yet, the voice was so unique and so compelling that I fell in love with this story. I could not put it down. I’ve heard many people say this book was too repetitive, and there is much of that. However, having lived in a dysfunctional family, that repetition rings true. Over and over as one sees hope, one is knocked down again. That’s why I think this is a story of survival. 

 

This debut novel was a well-deserved winner of the Booker Prize and a finalist for the National Book Award.