No Country: A Novel, by Kalyan Ray
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No Country: A Novel, by Kalyan Ray
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“A novel as easy to read as the latest bestseller, No Country is a rousing adventure made up out of the blood and guts and dreams of people on three continents and nearly 150 years of troubled history” (Alan Cheuse, NPR).In the poverty of rural Ireland in 1843, Padraig Aherne and Brendan McCarthaigh grew up as brothers, inseparable, even when Padraig falls in love with their beautiful classmate, Brigid. But when Padraig makes a dangerous mistake that forces him onto a ship bound for India, and the deadly potato famine sweeps through their tiny village, Brendan is left alone to care for his best friend’s child, an infant daughter Padraig never knew he had. Eventually, Brendan flees with her aboard one of the infamous “coffin ships,” to begin a new life in America. As Brendan’s and Padraig’s two family trees take root on opposite sides of the world, their tendrils begin to intertwine, moving inexorably toward a disastrous convergence more than a century later. Unfurling against the fickle backdrop of history that includes terrorism on the Indian subcontinent, an East European pogrom, the Triangle Shirtwaist fire in New York City, and the terrible intimacy of a murder in a sleepy New England town, the fallout from lives torn apart in No Country smolders for generations.
No Country: A Novel, by Kalyan Ray- Amazon Sales Rank: #1629222 in Books
- Brand: Ray, Kalyan
- Published on: 2015-06-30
- Released on: 2015-06-30
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.37" h x 1.20" w x 5.50" l, .0 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 560 pages
From Booklist This epic novel, spanning three continents and multiple generations, probes the nature of family and home. In Ireland in 1843, country lad Padraig Aherne runs into trouble in Dublin and ends up on a ship sailing to Calcutta, where he will make his fortune in the import business even as he is constantly haunted by his memories of Ireland. He leaves behind his girlfriend, Brigid, unaware that she is pregnant, and his best friend, Brendan. Faced with the deprivations of the potato famine, Brendan takes Padraig’s child to Canada, where, sick of their torturous sea journey, they find peace in the rural countryside and become tenant farmers. As the generations unspool, the novel touches on the Indian Partition, New York City’s Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, and the universal struggle of immigrants to find a home in their new countries. Told from multiple perspectives, this thoughtful novel offers a panoramic view of the way personal and national destinies collide, sometimes ending in tragedy, sometimes in triumph. Historical-fiction fans will find much to savor in this rich portrait of the trials and tribulations of immigrants. --Joanne Wilkinson
Review “No Country is a rousing adventure made up out of the blood and guts and dreams of people on three continents and nearly 150 years of troubled history.... Kalyan Ray doesn't just think about these matters splashed across three continents, he sharply dramatized them, avoiding kitsch and stock situations, embracing disparate stories to create an epic flow of tribute,celebration and commemoration, making a novel as easy to read as the latest bestseller, with a watermark that announces intelligence and fine prose at your fingertips.” (Alan Cheuse NPR)This sprawling novel gives new, multilayered meaning to that old cliché, “It's a small world.” Ray’s American debut is all about connections—and disconnections.... The variegated colors, tastes and textures of Ray’s narrative, as it moves through multiple points of view, lends a powerful sense of context to both the most trivial and the most tragic of human circumstances. Ray treads the fine line between coincidence and contrivance with bravado and finesse. (Kirkus Reviews (Starred Review))"[A] compelling answer to a primal question: where do I come from?... Readers fond of Salman Rushdie’s subcontinental epics should appreciate Ray’s combination of multigenerational saga and historical canvas, taking in the potato famine, the partition of India, and the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. Ray vividly illustrates the sentiment one of his characters puts down in a letter: '“We all stand at the same great isthmus in the geography of time. We are all related: Our mortality is our one common nation.'" (Publishers Weekly)Told from multiple perspectives, this thoughtful novel offers a panoramic view of the way personal and national destinies collide, sometimes ending in tragedy, sometimes in triumph. Historical fiction fans will find much to savor in this rich portrait of the trials and tribulations of immigrants. (Booklist)[W]renching... This compelling tale of cultural interconnectedness is highly recommended. (Library Journal (Starred Review))An unforgettable journey through lives, continents, and history, No Country leaves you deeply moved. Kalyan Ray shows both the thrill and trauma of immigration in a true and powerful way. A wonderful book. (Lara Vapnyar, award-winning author of The Scent of Pine)In No Country, anambitious, fascinating and suspenseful novel that spans continents andgenerations, Kalyan Ray deftly draws the reader into the lives of an unusualcast of characters who inhabit worlds as diverse as 19th century rural Ireland, colonial India and present day New York. Ray has painted these characters witha loving intricacy that made me truly care about their hopes, dreams, andtragic reversals of fate. (Chitra Divakaruni, author of Oleander Girl)This beautifully written, intelligent novel probes the nature of family, nation, and home—of the loyalties and allegiances which comprise identity itself. Beginning in a poor Irish village in 1843 and ending in upstate New York in 1989 by way of India, the story spans many generations and three continents to weave a panoramic tapestry, the very fabric of how we are all connected. This is a moving and compelling tale, full of richly satisfying ironies, and driven by a near-cosmic grasp of how fate and free will play out through our lives. (Enid Shomer, author of The Twelve Rooms of the Nile)
About the Author Kalyan Ray's family was uprooted from what later became Bangladesh. Educated in India and the US, he is the author of the novel Eastwords and has translated several books of contemporary Indian poetry into English. He has lived and taught in several countries on four continents, and currently divides his time between the USA and India with his wife, the Indian film director and actress Aparna Sen.
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9 of 9 people found the following review helpful. Not Quite Epic By Pemakan Kangkung Here is the recipe for No Country. Take equal parts The Raj Quartet, Trinity and Redemption, blend well. Add a dash of Jhumpa Lahiri, a smidgen of Kipling and a pinch of Ed McBain’s 87th Precinct to finish. Use the rind of one rotten potato for garnish. Read while on a Passage to India.No County is a tale of post-colonial misery covering two centuries, told through individual character’s voices. No Country is technically well done, as I would expect it to be. Ray does piece the interlocking short stories together in a unique way. And I like that kind of book. The ones that keep you wondering just how it will implode or link up at the end. No Country grabbed me in the first section. And I like epics, but after several of the earlier stories, I started to see the same tale repeated. Dead mothers, absent fathers. Missing people thought dead. So many dead mothers, that I kept thinking about the quote about losing both parents in The Importance of Being Earnest. And I kept predicting the next disaster. Other authors have used so much of this before that I could not stop from naming them. The geographic locations and exact outcomes were different, but Leon Uris did the Triangle Shirtwaist Company fire to maximum effect, albeit Uris set his fire in Londonderry. Ray can’t top Uris’s tragic scene of dead women outside a burning building for an image sticking in one’s head. He tries, but post 911, post World Trade Center, he just can’t.Sure, the immigrant experience is similar world over and perhaps that is the important message here, but No County did not pay off for me the way I thought it would. Ray took a great big bite into the problems of racial, national, culture identity that came after Empire building and immigration. Perhaps too big a bite to make the significant statement for which I believe he aimed.From the length of this review, one can tell that I have spent hours thinking and writing about what I felt about this book. That in itself means it is worth reading. The book places the characters inside historical events well—the time line is worked nearly perfectly—but something is stilted or forced. Perhaps it is because he is placing fictional characters inside real events, on real dates and so much time must pass. It feels like an exercise in writing to a prompt to “synthesize the given resources” rather than a naturally occurring story. The list of sources at the end reinforced that concept for me. It WAS an exercise.But any novel should “show” rather than simply retell, a tale. The stories that became long confessions or monologues in someone’s head explaining or revealing events in the past were far less interesting and compelling than those sections that included real dialog and action—present or past.I suffered from reader malaise and Deja Vu with the Indian parts. Wait, who am I reading? Why is Calcutta rioting this time? What year is it?? And I have a pretty firm grasp on subcontinent history and the cultural issues surrounding the breakup of India. For those who don’t already know about or don’t care about the political background to the Irish Potato famine, the nearly parallel independence struggles and the split of British India into India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, you are going to be wondering exactly what’s going on outside the story. And without that extant knowledge, the tales appear insubstantial; the lives really do not matter other than to spawn the next generation. There are too many obviously placed “historical Easter eggs” in the book, and not enough real symbolism. Merle Oberon? Seriously? She lied about her Anglo-Indian origin, but she does nothing important in this book. She’s not really a catalyst for anything. So why is she there?One reason for the seemingly inconsequential nature of the stories is that children—who take their surroundings totally for granted—often tell, or start, Ray’s interwoven stories. Children think, “This is the way life is everywhere.” And the political/sociological explanation is not forthcoming. Perhaps that is the genius of this book.Yes, there are flashes of genius, and it is where Ray decides not to explain the details with deathbed confessions, Merle Oberon and other literary tricks. Ray is Bangladeshi. That should say it all. The parts that could be closer to Ray’s personal experience, personal identity, are the parts where the smoke obscures the fire, and the story magically transported me to India, or Bangladesh, or Paksistan. Near the end, readers are handed the key to the entire book. Manu. The first man. Ahh, yes, Ray pulls it off best here in the world of the ever-opposed Ramayana-Mahabharata and the Kitab—Koran, but I am afraid most Western readers will miss the implications. All is clouded here not by desire, Arjuna, but by unfamiliarity.While perhaps the Irish Famine historical backstory will be more familiar to some readers, the older Irish formative myths are mentioned only in passing, and the Irish people feel less real to me than do the Anglo-Indians. There is no Ramayana-Mystery to implicate in these Irish and I started to hate them long before they deserved to be hated. I am Irish Catholic on one side of my family and have Indonesian-Dutch on another. I should identify with both parts of this far-flung story. (Italy, while the origin of one character is only an expendable catalyst for more disaster, and of no real import.) But on any continent, I only cared enough about of any of the characters to remain detached and outside the story reading on only to see exactly how the three bloodlines imploded at the end. After the promise of the first section that read like a murder mystery, I felt the end a bit anticlimactic even when I try to view it from a “Life is Cyclical” position. I wanted that police officer to discover just a little something more about the precipitating events. Honestly, the big penultimate event could have had nothing to do with the Aherne line and could just as well have been random.The portrayal of the last of the American Aherne line was so stereotypical, that I felt personally cheated (perhaps insulted) when the American-Irish side of the Aherne line had disintegrated totally into drunken, angry, unenlightened, illiterate brutes. While the twinned Indian lines (Aherne and Mitra) had, at least educationally, spiritually and intellectually, won the race to the better American future. However, based on my own family history, I cannot really say Ray is wide of the mark in that conclusion and perhaps that is what is spurring this review!I would call this book “Epic Light”. It does not quite reach Epic. If you have not read Uris or Paul Scott, you may really enjoy this book. If you just want to read a long book and not think about it too much, No Country may be entertaining. Don’t get me wrong, No Country is serious stuff, it is just not quite on the level it aspires to be. If you have read everyone who came before Ray in the Irish and Indian arenas, you might feel like Ray somehow stuck parts of that in blender and pushed Frappe!
9 of 9 people found the following review helpful. A fine generational, world-spanning historic novel By Bacterialover I quickly became enraptured by “No Country” and continued to enjoy its lush backdrops and interwoven stories of humanity until the bittersweet ends. The novel is aptly named because at its center the novel is about the human condition of being born, growing up, living, and dying, in various nation states of this Earth that are each indistinguishable in their basic challenges and joys.Starting in Ireland, the novel follows two young friends that are forced to leave their village and country due to different social and political circumstances, ending up on opposite sides of the world. They struggle to make their journeys, whether alone, or with dear friends. Once at their ‘destination’, immigrants in a new home, they find new challenges including the basic challenge of belonging, but not belonging, as a foreigner in a new homeland. The two Irish founders live in their new homes and give birth to new lines that go through their own struggles as the waves of history carry them to their own procreation and death. As time passes, more and more of the stories of their ancestors, and their traditions, begin to vanish into an amalgam of something new, but always full of hope and desire and dreams. And sometimes ugly tragedy.The most impressive element of Ray’s novel is its language and tone. Written in the first person throughout (obviously from various viewpoints), the voice changes from section to section based on the characters, as one would like. The early portions of rural Ireland are filled with a vocabulary and syntax that evokes the setting truly. Portions in India or the New World are suitably distinct and true themselves. Whether shifting in space, or in time, the writing shifts as well. I almost didn’t even notice this fact as I read the novel, as the story swept from place and time. But the biggest shifts at the end of the novel really made it clear as the reader is introduced to characters that are far from the heart and mind of the ancestors we’d been getting to know, reminding us that for all we may strive to make this world a greater place for our offspring, we have no control over what offspring will end up inheriting our legacies, nor of what future history can shatter all we build and value.Rather than being depressing as I may make it all sound, the novel still manages to resonate with measures of love and hope, and beyond anything, the sense that all we humans that are on this planet are a bunch of intermingled mongrels, with shared backgrounds and ancestors. It is a reminder that though we may have our nationalities, we are each of us born of immigrants who in turn came from other immigrants, unfamiliar to our current land, stuck in their ‘ethnic ways’, destitution and dreams not unlike the newest batches of immigrants we see around us today. A beautiful novel.I received a free advanced reading copy of this from the publisher via NetGalley in return for an honest review.
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful. beautifully woven tapestry By Chase E. No Country is one of those rare books that haunts and inspires a reader long after putting it down. Set in Ireland, India, and the United States, the book spans more than two centuries and includes a cast of characters whose stories interweave in beautiful and sometimes heart-rending ways. Along the way there are many surprises, and it all culminates in an ending that will leave you thinking. I bought the book after hearing the author at a reading, and I could hardly put it down until I reached the end. The author captures the voice of each character with a distinct writing style for each. He also must have done a great deal of research to capture the feel of each place that the book visits. The settings are vivid, and the characters are wonderfully portrayed. They feel like people you might meet, and even like people you might laugh or cry with. The story as a whole also explores the experience of the immigrant and the complexities that make up identity. This book will move you and make you think. Highly recommended for anyone looking for a thoughtful, moving journey.
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