In the Booker-shortlisted Brick Lane, Monica Ali brings Nazneen, 18, back from the dead-end of a life in Bangladesh by marrying her off to Chanu, twice her age, to live in London’s Tower Hamlets. Restless and yearning for home, she not only learns to live but to love and bear the consequences.
The consequences is what Orhan Pamuk’s poet-journalist hero Kerim, abbreviated to Ka, of Snow must face as he gets entangled with the lives of the melancholic people of a border town in Turkey. The people of Kars, a remote city, live a dual life, caught as they are between secularism and rising fundamentalism, democracy and the veil, poverty and unemployment. Pamuk, the winner of the Nobel prize in literature in 2006, hints at what’s to be expected in the epigraphs, particularly the quotes from Stendhal (“Politics in a literary work are a pistol-shot in the middle of a concert, a crude affair though one impossible to ignore. We are about to speak of very ugly matters.”) and Dostoevsky (“Well, then, eliminate the people, curtail them, force them to be silent. Because the European enlightenment is more important than people.”). As it turns out, the “ugly matters” make the people of Kars perpetually sad.

“Happiness,” spouts the neurosurgeon protagonist, Henry Perowne, of Ian McEwan’s post 9/11 novel Saturday, “is a harder nut to crack”. The outside, not least a huge gathering of war protestors, will invade the inside and shatter the seemingly blissful marital bliss of the Perownes.
Invasion — that’s what shattered the lives of Irene Nemirovsky and her family of four as the Germans took control of Paris in 1940. Suite Francaise is an amazing story of struggle and survival — the novel itself remained hidden and unknown for 64 years till her daughter sent it to the printers. On July 3, 1942, Nemirovsky, the Russian-Jew writer who had made France her home but failed to get protection as Germans occupied Paris, jotted these words in her diary: “Just let it be over — one way or the other!” Days later, the French police were at her door and she was deported to Auschwitz, where she died within a month, leaving two daughters, one aged 10, the other 5.
But even as she was closer to death, she wrote the two books that form Suite Francaise, filling it with funny and deeply moving details of a people caught in flight, life in villages full of German soldiers where the locals had to learn to coexist with the enemy. But do we learn to coexist with the enemy? Can we share our home — and heart — with someone perceived to be one?

... contd.