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A Golden Age: A Novel (Bangla Desh Book 1) Kindle Edition
“Spellbinding . . . . Anam has written a story about powerful events. But it is her descriptions of the small, unheralded moments . . . that truly touch the heart.” —San Francisco Chronicle
Tahmima Anam’s deeply moving debut novel about a mother’s all-consuming love for her two children, set against the backdrop of war and terror, has led critics to comparisons with The English Patient and A Thousand Splendid Suns.
Rehana Haque, a young widow transplanted to the city of Dhaka in East Pakistan, is fiercely devoted to her adolescent children, Maya and Sohail. Both become fervent nationalists in the violent political turmoil which, in 1971, transforms a brutal Pakistani civil war into a fight to the death for Bangladeshi independence. Fair-minded and intensely protective of her family, but not at all political, Rehana is sucked into the conflict in spite of herself.
A story of passion and revolution, of family, friendship and unexpected heroism, A Golden Age depicts the chaos of an era and the choices everyone—from student protesters to the country’s leaders, and rickshaw wallahs to the army’s soldiers—must make. Rehana herself will face a cruel dilemma; the choice she makes is at once heartbreaking and true to the character we have come to love and respect.
Review
From The New Yorker
Copyright © 2008 Click here to subscribe to The New Yorker --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Booklist
From Publishers Weekly
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Bookmarks Magazine
Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From The Washington Post
Reviewed by Wendy Smith
Tahmima Anam's first novel is a generous act of creative empathy. Born in Bangladesh four years after the nation won its independence from Pakistan, the author grew up abroad and now lives in London. Yet from her family's stories and her own research, she has crafted a compelling tale steeped in her native land's diverse culture. A Golden Age chronicles a young widow's hesitant heroism during the convulsive year 1971, when rebels, including the widow's teenaged son and daughter, battle an army employing genocide and torture to subdue Pakistan's breakaway eastern region.
Rehana Haque is an unlikely hero. A prologue set in 1959 shows her losing a custody battle with her wealthy brother-in-law Faiz. "Poor, and friendless," 26-year-old Rehana lacks the confidence to assert that her children belong with their mother. When the judge asks, "What would your husband want?" she admits, "He would want them to be safe." Faiz convinces the judge that Maya and Sohail are not safe in Dhaka, Bangladesh's capital city, roiled by strikes and demonstrations; they are sent to live with him in West Pakistan, a thousand miles away. The prologue closes with Rehana's rueful memories of her husband, a cautious insurance executive who foresaw and forestalled every possible danger to his children and his much younger wife -- except the sudden heart attack that left Rehana unable to prevent Faiz from taking them.
Twelve years later, as the main action begins, Rehana is preparing the party she throws each year to celebrate the day in 1961 when she brought her children back to Dhaka. How she got the money to reclaim them remains a mystery for the moment, but we see immediately how fiercely devoted she is to Maya and Sohail, how anxious to shelter them from all harm. Days later, when the election that promised greater autonomy for Bangladesh is annulled and Pakistani troops descend on Dhaka, Maya and Sohail, now 17 and 19 years old, unhesitatingly join the resistance movement. Their mother simply hopes that these troubles will soon blow over, that "the children would go on being her children . . . living ordinary, unexceptional lives."
Though the author cogently sketches the necessary historical background, she doesn't unduly concern herself with political specifics. Her novel tells the story of one woman's personal odyssey. It's Rehana's love for her children that initially embroils her in the resistance, her fundamental decency that leads to her deeper involvement. When Sohail asks to use the second house on her property as a hiding place for guerrillas and weapons, she agrees. She's proud that her son is "so fine, so ready to take charge. This was who she had hoped he would become, even if she had never imagined that her son, or the world, would come to this."
Her relations with Maya are thornier. Anam paints a nuanced portrait of a prickly daughter and maladroit mother that will ring true to any parent of an adolescent, though the circumstances here are grimly particular to a country at war. The discovery that Maya's best friend has been raped, tortured and murdered by soldiers shocks Rehana into supporting her daughter's decision to take a more active role in the resistance.
It also gives her the backbone to stand up to her brother-in-law, who's involved in the army's brutal repression. "Surely you don't want this on your conscience," she tells Faiz, extorting his help to get a neighbor's son out of jail. The young man has been tortured so severely that he dies shortly after Rehana rescues him, and she slips across the border to India, fearful that Faiz may have betrayed her. The misery she sees in a refugee camp outside Calcutta reinforces Rehana's commitment to the struggle for independence.
Readable and well crafted, A Golden Age bears some traces of its first-time author's inexperience. In particular, Rehana's evolution from a fearful mother to a strong, resourceful woman seems too smooth. Wouldn't she have been more frightened about allowing her house to be used as a guerrilla base? Would her relationship with Maya have been so quickly transformed into easily expressed affection? Would she have been that blunt with Faiz, whose army ties give him so much power? This warmhearted novel might have plumbed more deeply the potential for evil in even the most honorable people confronted with life-threatening choices.
When it counts the most, however, Anam does not flinch from complexity and horror of a more intimate nature than the details of atrocities. Nursing a wounded rebel in her home, Rehana falls in love with the first person who has ever bothered to ask about her deepest feelings, a man with whom she can share her most shameful secret. The closing pages achieve real tragic stature as we see Rehana quietly mourning on the day that Bangladesh will finally achieve independence. Amid the crowd singing "How I love you, my golden Bengal," she is surely not the only one who must live with the knowledge of what she did during a cruel war.
Copyright 2008, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.
From AudioFile
From the Back Cover
Rehana Haque, a young widow, blissfully prepares for the party she will host for her son and daughter. But this is 1971 in East Pakistan, and change is in the air.
Set against the backdrop of the Bangladesh War of Independence, A Golden Age is a story of passion and revolution; of hope, faith, and unexpected heroism in the midst of chaos—and of one woman's heartbreaking struggle to keep her family safe.
--This text refers to the paperback edition.About the Author
Tahmima Anam is an anthropologist and a novelist. Her debut novel, A Golden Age, won the 2008 Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Book. In 2013, she was named one of Granta’sBest Young British Novelists. She is a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times and was a judge for the 2016 International Man Booker Prize. Born in Dhaka, Bangladesh, she was educated at Mount Holyoke College and Harvard University, and now lives in Hackney, East London.
--This text refers to the paperback edition.- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherHarperCollins e-books
- Publication dateOctober 13, 2009
- File size2508 KB
Product details
- ASIN : B0012095BC
- Publisher : HarperCollins e-books; Reprint edition (October 13, 2009)
- Publication date : October 13, 2009
- Language : English
- File size : 2508 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Sticky notes : On Kindle Scribe
- Print length : 326 pages
- Best Sellers Rank: #754,845 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #97 in Historical Middle Eastern Fiction
- #1,292 in Read & Listen for $14.99 or Less
- #2,512 in Read & Listen for Less
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
Tahmima Anam is the recipient of a Commonwealth Writers' Prize and an O. Henry Award, and has been named one of Granta's best young British novelists. She is a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times and was recently elected as a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Born in Dhaka, Bangladesh, she was educated at Mount Holyoke College and Harvard University, and now lives in London, where she is on the board of ROLI, a music tech company founded by her husband.
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First, the story immediately drew me in and then didn't let go. Anam opens her novel with "Dear Husband, I lost our children today" Maybe it's just me but I had to find out what happened and why. Anam draws her characters carefully and we get to understand each one gradually and more and more in the course of the story. She has the ability to create a multitude of pictures before your eyes for each scene, of each character, the surrounding, how each of them felt, what drives their actions. Even when Rehana (the main character) just washes clothes, these pictures help you see each movement as part of a larger puzzle that comes together to a spell binding story line.
Second, I learned so much from this novel: about the history of Bangladesh, the relationships between Bangladesh, Pakistan, and India, the daily lives, thoughts and hopes of people living in those places at that time. Although the author does not set out to teach but to tell a story, learning to love her characters also means learning to understand something about their home and hearts.
Is there anything I did not like about the book? No, not really. A small improvement would have been adding a glossary of Bangla terms used in the book. There are not many and the meaning is clear without them, but I would have liked to understand everything. That's not worth taking off a star though.
Who would I recommend the book to: Of course anybody interested in Bangladesh or South Asia in general, but more importantly anybody interested in a good story about family, a mother fighting for her children, the fate of friends torn apart in war, love and life... Although the historic events and location are specific, the story and people are deeply human - and therefore open themselves easily to all of us.
Rehana, Sohail, Maya - I already miss you. And, yes, I can't wait to read more about your story in Anam's second novel.
Because of her children's involvement in politics, Rehana Haque also becomes heavily involved. Her brother-in-law Faiz comes to Dhaka to assist the Pakistani government interrogate captured rebels. Maya's best friend falls into the hands of the interrogators, who rape and murder her. Rehana agrees to harbor rebels, guns, ammunition, explosives, and medical supplies under her roof. Bangladeshi guerrillas train in her backyard. A sewing group forms on her roof to make blankets for the rebels. Rehana finds herself falling in love with a rebel commander known as the Major. When Sabeer, deserting the Pakistani army to follow his conscience, falls into the hands of Faiz's police, Rehana risks everything to go to Faiz to plead for his release. Faiz signs the release but then reads an anti-Pakistani article with the by-line "Sheherezade Haque Maya" and knows. Forced to flee to Calcutta, Rehana works as an aide in a refugee camp hospital.
The book is well-written, although I was expecting more information about the genocides as reported in American newspapers at the time. The seeming lack of hardship is either an indictment of bias on the part of the American press or an oversite on the part of the author. On the other hand, it is interesting to note the timing of the accusation of former Pakistani Prime Minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, the father of recently assassinated Benazir Bhutto, of collusion in the political machinations that led to the Bangladeshi rebellion. These are the reasons for my 4 stars rather than a 5 star rating.
I loved the characters. They were well drawn, especially for a first novel, but mainly the truth of them showed better in peace than in war. Some nice symbolism, far enough from the surface that it was not obvious, and the more effective for it. The finest scene, I thought, was in the refugee camp across the border. Very moving, not for its pity but for its ability to get below the surface.
The thing I liked the least was the one-sided portrayal of the West Pakistan occupiers. Perhaps accurate - certainly there were enough atrocities to make it legitimate. Although they do have their moments of human warmth and yielding, one suspects that there was more humanity to them than this story allows to be seen. They are shown, essentially, as all Gestapo.
But never mind. The fight to be free of the gestapos goes on, in many ways, in many lands, for many causes. Freedom is always advanced by the kind of honesty about life which is found in books like this.
Top reviews from other countries
Through A Golden Age, Rehana is more of a witness than an active member, like her children. We never witness the full atrocities that the people suffered but we do encounter the result of them through her eyes as we follow her from her home to refugee camps. And not knowing fully what the Pakistan army was doing, we're thrown into the same tense situation is Rehana in. We learn the real costs of war through the lives of this semi-real family. (I believe Rehana was based on Anam's grandmother and her experiences) I loved the way she described Bangladesh, the culture, the food, the landscape. My favourite part was beginning of the novel and how Anam introduced the land and country. It was, at most times, so calming and beautiful before everything goes terribly wrong.
No one should really think of this as an actual account of what happened but an introduction that can incite further research. A Golden Age is more personal and human, and I felt plenty of emotion while reading Rehana's story. A Golden Age was a good introduction to Bangladesh's fight for independence, especially for me who grew up knowing barely anything apart from the fact I was born on the same date it started.