Brick Lane

by Monica Ali

Book Overview

"A book you won't be able to put down. A Bangladeshi immigrant in London is torn between the kind, tedious older husband with whom she has an arranged marriage (and children) and the fiery political activist she lusts after. A novel that's multi-continental, richly detailed and elegantly crafted." --Curtis Sittenfeld, author of Sisterland

After an arranged marriage to Chanu, a man twenty years older, Nazneen is taken to London,...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0743243315
• ISBN13: 9780743243315
• Release Date: June 2004
• Publisher: Scribner Book Company
• Length: 432 Pages
• Weight: 0.83 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 5.3" x 8.3"

Customer Reviews

Brick Lane

This is a highly intelligent novel with writing so evocative (and I'm not just talking about the cooking-with-spices and colourful-laundry stuff)that you know no movie of the week or Hollywood effort could ever do justice to it. The story is about Nazneen's life as a young Bangladeshi bride brought to London and her growing realization that she can manipulate "fate". Her husband is a silly buffoon who the reader at first despises but eventually feels some fondness for. Nazneen protests her unpleasant situation silently; for example, she refuses to eat in front of her husband. She eats out of Tupperware containers during the night standing over the sink. At one point she equally despises and pities her husband,simultaneously feeling like "going to him and stroking his head ....and getting up from the table and walking out of the door and never seeing him again." Familiar feelings anyone? My only complaint about this excellent book is the device of conveying Nazeen's sister's thoughts through letters from Bangladesh. They hardly ring true. Why couldn't Hasina's (the sister) version be told, like Nazneen's, in the third person? Her letters are a silly combination of Bengali-English and incredible insight conveyed with what is meant to be naivete. They don't work. However, this is the book's only flaw. The story is fascinating, rolls along at a good pace, is very, very funny and very, very tragic. It is a story that is rich in detail yet every word, in English or Bengali, is necessary. When you have finished reading it you feel enriched, educated, chastened, entertained, and hungry for more books by Monica Ali.

An immigrant's tale. Beautiful and tragic.

I am from Bangladesh, and have lived in the West for some years. Although Westernized in many ways, I am acutely aware of the experience of being brown and Asian in the West. Monica Ali's "Brick Lane" touches me in multiple ways."Brick Lane" is unique. There are many novels centered on Bengali housewives; unfortunately most are in Bengali and not translated. The number of novels with Bangladeshi women as protagonists is smaller. Novels dealing with Bangladeshi immigrant women are very rare --- Ms Ali is exploring new ground here. And she does it so touchingly, with such attention to detail and nuances.The novel is about Nazneen, born in a Bangladeshi village and married off to an older man who is an immigrant in England. Nazneen moves to England, submits herself to fate as she has been taught to, bears life and children and her husband's stupidities, and watches her daughter grow Westernized. Eventually, she surprises herself by her own initiative, taking a lover and deciding not to return to Bangladesh with her husband.Other than Nazneen, the main characters are her husband Chanu, and her sister Hasina whom we meet through her letters to Nazneen written over the years. We also meet several other immigrant Bangladeshi characters living in Brick Lane, and get flashbacks of Nazneen's life in Bangladesh.Through Hasina's sporadic letters to Nazneen, which take up significant parts of the book, we follow the life of an unmarried lower-class woman in Bangladesh. Hasina, unlike Nazneen, chooses her own path in life and elopes as a teenager, but her husband leaves her and she suffers through a series of ordeals. Her life story is probably realistic and reflects the lives of the many poor rural women in Bangladesh who have moved to the cities in recent years, forced to be independent in a patriarchial society that resists women's independence.Like other reviewers, I was annoyed by the author's choice to transcribe Hasina's letters in broken English. This is the only major complaint I have about the book.The characterization of Nazneen's husband, Chanu, is masterly. Chanu is an educated but completely impractical person. A complete failure in British life, he toils away as a clerk hoping that his culture & worth will someday be appreciated. He borrows money and leaves his wife to deal with the usurer. He appreciates the wrong people, and is completely unable to deal with his daughter's rebellion.Perhaps even more paradigmic is Chanu's pompous behavior with his wife. The Bengali male, it has been said, is a great loser in life and a fearless lion in dealing with his subservient wife.Chanu actually thinks of himself as a liberated man, whose wife has complete freedom in theory. In practice, unfortunately, Nazneen does not get to taste any of these freedoms (such as learning the local language English). The reason is that "she does not need them", as Chanu assures her, and also because it is unnecessary to evoke gossip in the immigrant co

A gripping story about Bangladesh women at Home and Abroad

"A man's character is his fate." With this quote from Heraclitus, Monica Ali takes us on Nazneen's 35-year fateful journey from her birth in 1967 in the Mymensingh District of East Pakistan to her independence in London in 2002. As a newborn she did not nurse for five days yet survived. In 1985, at age 18, she marries a man 22 years older whom she had never seen, a man who had been living in England since the early 1970s. Chanu needs her to cut his hair, his nails, and his corns, clip his nose hairs, feed him, keep his apartment clean, wash his clothes and to bear his children. When she is 21 she bears a son who dies after a year and then she has two daughters. Chanu is educated and she is not. He has a degree from Dhaka University in English literature and is working for an Open University degree. She knew no English. When she expressed a desire to go college to learn English Chanu said "there was no need." What English she learned she learned from her daughters, who "demanded to be understood [in English]." She lives in a cube, with thin walls, falling plaster, and two sinks, in public housing. Her husband's ambition is humbled by the racial wall-at the age of 43 he resigns from his job in the council of the local government. After months of depression he determines to return to Dhaka and to raise money for his trip he becomes "driver number one-six one nine" for Kempton Kars. It is Nazneen, however, who makes the money for the family with her sewing machine. She has an affair with a younger man when she is 34, a man who brings her garments to sew and is a founder of an active Islamic group, the Bengal Tigers. She learns about love from the wise Dr. Azad: ". . . 'there are two kinds of love. The kind that starts big and slowly wears away, that seem you can never use it up and then one day is finished. And the kind that you don't notice at first, but which adds a little bit to itself every day, like an oyster makes a pearl, grain by grain, a jewel from the sand.'" Nazneen's younger sister Hasina, is always in the background. She never leaves Bangladesh. At age16 she elopes in a love marriage, a marriage that fails. She works as a machine woman sewing garments but her beauty is too much and she is locked out of the factory, accused of licentious behavior. She becomes a prostitute and marries Ahmed, one of her clients. Family pressure causes him to later turn against her. She seeks refuge in the House of Falling Women, run by Brother Andrew from Canada. Lovely hires her as a nanny for her son and daughter. Ultimately she runs away again with Lovely's young cook. It is Hasina who tells Nazneen about their mother's suicide dressed in her best sari. This is the mother who told her daughters "'If God wanted us to ask questions, he would have made us men." Although Chanu has been gone from Bangladesh for over thirty years, he pines for home. He yearns for the sixteenth century, when Bengal was the "Paradise of Nations". Wh

A book I will think about for a long time

This Booker Prize-nominated novel provides engaging characters and thought-provoking insight into the Muslim immigrant world. The main character, Nazneen, is a young "unspoiled" Bangladeshi village girl who enters into an arranged marriage with a much older Bangladeshi who lives in London. Her beautiful sister defies her father's wishes and elopes in a love match, running off to Dakha. Nazneen has been raised to accept whatever happens to her, but in London, gradually (over the course of 15 years or so) begins to take control of her own life. Her husband Chanu at first seems clownlike, for example, he frames a collection of meaningless certificates for very minor achievements. Chanu regards himself as a scholar, because he has a BA from a Bangladeshi university, but he realizes that in Britain, he is regarded as nobody of any importance). Nazneen is expected to trim his corns every night, and later, his daughters are expected to sit beside him as he reads to turn the pages for him. But Chanu is a complex person who has a good heart, and the reader develops a fondness for this would-be patriarch. Life has not turned out as he wanted or expected, but he is devoted to his family. Nazneen, on the other hand, had no expectations of life but has been swept along like a piece of wood in a river. Her transformation -- how to combine the traditional values and reject what is problematic in the western world while recognizing what is bad about the old ways and changing -- forms the plot of the book. In the background is her sister's story, told in letters; the sister, who was more proactive in her choices, suffers the consequences, and it's hard to avoid wondering if the sister would not have been better off in an arranged marriage. The reader is left pondering Western vs. non-Western values, particularly with regard to love and marriage. Like other reviewers, I found the use of broken English in her sister's letters baffling and annoying -- fortunately they were a comparatively small part of the book. If her sister was writing in Bengali, wouldn't it be grammatical at least? And why would her sister write in English (which would explain the bad grammar)?The author has done a great job of creating a very different world for the reader to inhabit. Life for Muslim women both in a council estate (public housing project) in London (Nazneen's story) and a large city in Bangladesh (her sister's story) are described vividly and without romantic illusions.This is not a quickly read book, but it certainly held my interest all the way through, and I will remember these characters for a long time.

"If you mix with all these people?you give up your culture."

Nazneen, a young bride married at sixteen to a 40-year-old man, is wrenched from the only life she has ever known in the countryside of Bangladesh and conveyed to England, where her new husband, Chanu, has a job. Taught from the day of her birth that "fighting against one's Fate can weaken the blood," or even be fatal, she accepts the miserably lonely existence that fate has bestowed on her in a London council flat. Nazneen's only contact with home is the letters she exchanges with her sister Hasina, whose own fate back home in Dhaka changes throughout the fifteen years that this novel takes place. Through these letters, author Ali shows the similarities and contrasts in the lives of Nazneen and Hasina, both subservient to their husbands, and, like other Bengali wives, powerless to control their fates in the culture in which they live.With warmth and sensitivity, author Ali draws us into Nazneen's world, showing it in all its earthy details. The reader sees her increasingly cluttered apartment, hears the constant excuses and boasts from Chanu, gets lost with her on a walk in the city, and feels Nazneen's confusion and frustration with the isolation of her life, as she continues to act the dutiful wife, cutting Chanu's corns and trimming his nose hair while planning mini-rebellions. Her sister, eventually alone in Dhaka, struggles to support herself, doing whatever she has to do to stay alive in a culture in which her life has no value. But, as their mother once said, "If God wanted us to ask questions, he would have made us men." Speaking directly to the reader in unpretentious but vividly descriptive prose, Ali recreates the minutiae of Nazneen's life, showing how the seemingly unimportant decisions she begins to make acquire new meanings in her life. Through striking details, the reader watches her gradual acceptance of a new culture (which some would call "growth"), while her husband Chanu remains anchored in the traditions of the past. Her slow evolution is neither simple nor without conflict, and no member of the family escapes her transformation. Brick Lane reveals the emotional conflicts and the subtle changes that occur when an immigrant sees the possibilities inherent in a new culture, radically different from the culture of the past, and begins to embrace it.. Step by inevitable step, Ali shows just how this process evolves, creating a vibrant portrait of a family in transition and of a woman coming into her own. Mary Whipple