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Brick Lane: By the bestselling author of LOVE MARRIAGE

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Although I loved the ideal of freedom that drives the final scene, it felt as if Ali was trying for a more definite fictional closure than, by that time, her complicated characters can bear. It includes British expatriates and local Portuguese inhabitants of the village, and is written predominantly in the third person as each chapter moves from the perspective of one character to another. Tannishtha Chatterjee, one of India's leading art-house actors who plays Nazneen, explained how she had learned to speak English with a London Bangladeshi accent. In 2003, she was selected as one of the "Best of Young British Novelists" by Granta magazine based on her unpublished manuscript; her debut novel, Brick Lane, was published later that year. The novel and film provoked criticism by some in the Bangladeshi community in London, who thought that Chanu, and the Bangladeshis from Sylhet generally, were portrayed in a negative way.

Confined in her tiny flat, Nazneen sews furiously for a living, shut away with her buttons and linings - until the radical Karim steps unexpectedly into her life. Instead, she surprised readers and critics with her second novel Alentejo Blue (20006) by turning to Southern Portugal and slowing the pace of her narrative greatly.Last month Clarence House (the Queen and Prince Charles attend on alternate years) suddenly decided to pull out of the royal film performance, citing a "diary clash". Sarah Gavron, the film's director, was anxious to tell me that she had found a great deal of support in the area, worried perhaps that I had believed the initial press reports. And I am aware that given the nature of the press coverage, and the rumours circulating that, for example, the film would show a leech falling into a curry pot in a Brick Lane restaurant (which doesn't happen in either novel or film), people who haven't read the book are now much more likely to feel hostile towards it. Photograph: Ulf Andersen/Getty Images Monica Ali said she became depressed when her 2011 book Untold Story was met with ‘bafflement’.

I find this the most worrying aspect of the whole affair because it is symptomatic of deep and far-reaching changes in our political, social and cultural life. The chief protagonist of Brick Lane was born in an East Pakistan village in 1967, prior to Bangladesh Liberation War. The novel centers around the life of Nazneen, a Bangladeshi immigrant who marries an older man named Chanu Ahmed in an arranged marriage. Away from her Bangladeshi village, home is now a cramped flat in a high-rise block in London's East End.Her calculations show that not only have she and Chanu paid the debt back, but they have handed over at least 300 pounds in interest. Chanu and Nazneen attend a Muslim rally in a town hall and Chanu berates the cause of the gathering but they rebuff his statements. Nazneen becomes filled with desire for the young, good-looking Karim who visits her regularly, and they have an affair.

While Chanu is intent on escaping the truth of his wife’s affair, Nazneen is faced with the truth about her mother’s death through her sister’s revelation of the secret surrounding Rupban’s death. In 1947, the predominantly Hindu region of West Bengal was made part of India, while the mostly Muslim region of East Bengal became part of Pakistan. However, though still a work that impressed with its choreography and craft, some thought the novel overlong and, as the New York Times couldn’t resist remarking, “overcooked.Last year, while I was out of the country and blissfully unaware, a "controversy" was whipped up in the media over the filming. Still, Nazneen does not love her husband, and in fact finds his delusions of grandeur pathetic and off-putting. For the second time in 60 years (the first was in 1958) there will be no royal film performance this year.

In Michael Gorra’s review for the New York Times, he proposes that this negotiation with fate imbues the novel with a complexity that stretches beyond simplistic binary oppositions: "Do we, can we, control our own lives? In 2020, Ali was appointed Patron of Hopscotch Women's Centre, [18] a charity that was originally set up by Save the Children to support ethnic minority families who had come to join their partners in the UK. Shaped, yet not bound, by their landscapes and memories, both sisters struggle to dream -- and live -- beyond the rules prescribed for them. Islam, an older widow who claims to be an authority on everyone living in Tower Hamlets, and Razia Iqbal, an irreverent yet kind woman with two young children and an angry husband who grows furious whenever she defies his wishes or the conventional expectations of the local Bengali community.To the great surprise of friends and family, including her father, Hamid, Nazneen survives and grows up into a plain, thoughtful child who, like her mother, decides that most everything in life should be left to God. With Karim's help, she is able to find Shahana, and that night Nazneen tells Chanu that she and the children will be remaining in London. Demonstrating her talent for surprising readers once more, Ali’s next outing, The Untold Story, altered course again, taking readers to small-town America, and into the world of Lydia, a mysterious woman from overseas cherishing her quiet life.

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