Review: Quarantine: Stories by Rahul Mehta

Rating: 4/5 Stars

Genre: Short Stories

Published: 2010

Goodreads Summary:

"Reminiscent of Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies and the work of Michael Cunningham, Rahul Mehta’s debut short story collection is an emotionally arresting exploration of the lives ofIndian-American gay men and their families. Manil Suri, the New YorkTimes bestselling author of The Death of Vishnu and The Age of Shiva calls Quarantine “an insightful and compellingly readable collection of stories in which Rahul Mehta masterfully explores the emotions, the conflicts, the complex accommodations of being gay and Indian American."

Review:

Whoo! Please excuse that awkward title. Too many colons.

I was unsure at first of how much I would like this collection; I picked it up at the library on a whim from the Pride Month display because it sounded vaguely interesting. I love short story collections, but they're really hit or miss, depending on the writer. This book, though, was pretty good overall! 

The stories were raw and very atmospheric. At times, they could get depressing - one called What We Mean was just the agonizing death of a relationship between two pretentious writers. But they could also be very sweet and/or poignant, like Citizen, about an older woman who struggles to study for her citizenship test and gets help from her grandson, or the aforenamed Quarantine, about the effect a grandfather has on his family after immigrating from India to live with them.

I would recommend this to people who aren't looking for something cheerful but are looking for honest portrayals of 21st-century relationships, whether it's between family, friends, or lovers, and the struggle to assimilate into American culture.

Review: Night by Elie Wiesel

Rating: 3/5 Stars

Genre: Historical Nonfiction

Published: 1958

Goodreads Summary:

"Night is a work by Elie Wiesel about his experience with his father in the Nazi German concentration camps at Auschwitz and Buchenwald in 1944–1945, at the height of the Holocaust and toward the end of the Second World War. In just over 100 pages of sparse and fragmented narrative, Wiesel writes about the death of God and his own increasing disgust with humanity, reflected in the inversion of the father–child relationship as his father declines to a helpless state and Wiesel becomes his resentful teenage caregiver.

Penetrating and powerful, as personal as The Diary Of Anne Frank,Night awakens the shocking memory of evil at its absolute and carries with it the unforgettable message that this horror must never be allowed to happen again."

Review:

This is a tricky book to review. I think trying to review any nonfiction comes with challenges, but when you consider the topic - the genocide of the Jewish people during the Second World War and all of the horrors surrounding it - it becomes even harder. Night is told from the point of view of the fifteen-year-old Elie, taken with his family from their home and imprisoned in multiple concentration camps. The story itself is heartbreaking, more so when you consider how young he was and all of the atrocities he experienced in such a short time. 

Trying to pick apart the writing itself makes me uncomfortable because that's not what's really important about the book. What's important is keeping the memory of the Holocaust itself alive, the story of the six million people killed for nothing other than their faith. It's incredibly important to keep their memory alive so that nothing similar ever happens again. As someone once said, 'Those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it.' 

So really, the only thing I can say about the book is: read it, in the memory of every person like Elie Wiesel who lived through one of the worst horrors in human history.

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