Brick Lane: By the bestselling author of LOVE MARRIAGE

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Monica Ali begins the story with the birth of Nazneen in a Bangladeshi village. The untimely death of her mother pushes Nazneen towards an unconventional path. Set between 1985 and 2002, the narrative focuses on three main characters all living on an imaginary East End council estate. Nazneen is introduced as the submissive, village, virgin bride sent to London to begin a new life with Chanu, her rotund, older, opinionated husband. The third character is Karim, a second-generation streetwise Sylheti ‘lad’ who becomes the ‘lover’ of Nazneen and is swiftly radicalised after 9/11.

In 1999, starting out tentatively as an artist, I had my first exhibition on Dray Walk, part of the hip Truman Brewery complex (once the largest brewery in London which stopped making beer in 1988). In the last decade the area has undergone rapid change. Spitalfields has been renovated and blends into the affluent gleaming buildings on Liverpool Street on the edges of the City’s ‘Square Mile’. The achingly cool (or not so, it’s a matter of opinion) Shoreditch is only a hop away. She lives in South London with her husband, Simon Torrance, a management consultant. They have two children, Felix (born 1999) and Shumi (born 2001). a b "Interview: Monica Ali, author". The Scotsman. 8 April 2011. Archived from the original on 24 May 2015. {{ cite news}}: CS1 maint: unfit URL ( link) Kellaway, Kate (30 January 2022). "Monica Ali: 'My children say I'm the worst storyteller ever' ". TheGuardian.com. But although she is so good at showing how this desire catches Nazneen unawares, the relationship between Nazneen and her husband isn't given the short shrift that one might expect in such a context. Ali has a deft comic touch, and at first Chanu seems to be not much more than a figure of fun, with his huge belly, his useless certificates for unimpressive qualifications, his crumpled trousers, his deluded ambitions, and the corns on his feet that poor Nazneen has to scrape away night after night.Nazneen’s sister Hasina, on the other hand, is born beautiful and rebellious, and at sixteen elopes in a love marriage with a local boy, much to the fury of Hamid, who keeps vigil at the edge of the village for sixteen days, prepared to chop his daughter’s head off should she return. She does not return, however, and Hamid, a widower following Rupban’s apparently accidental fall onto a sharp spear, arranges for Nazneen to marry Chanu, a forty-something man living in London. The writer and activist Germaine Greer expressed support for the campaign, writing in The Guardian: With her next novel, Ali returned to the broad ‘condition of England’ sweep and energised migrant environment of her debut. As the title suggests, Into the Kitchen (2009) used the hotel restaurant in central London as one microcosm from which Ali could range broadly over her now familiar themes of national identity, family and belonging. Scenes from this setting are set against the very different world of a northern mill town where the father of Gabriel Lighfoot, the London chef, is living out his last days. Bedell, Geraldine (15 June 2003). "Full of East End promise". The Observer . Retrieved 31 May 2005.

The fourth and most important issue hinges on a word much in play these days: offence. 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 protest organisers say they are offended that a character in the novel - Chanu, Nazneen's husband - says rude things about Sylhetis (Sylhet is a region of Bangladesh). He most certainly does. Here is the passage, early in the book, from which the objectors most often quote: Boyt, Susie (2 February 2022). "Love Marriage by Monica Ali — matrimony under the microscope". Financial Times. Archived from the original on 11 December 2022.As I watched the rough cut I spent the whole time either thinking about what had been left out (despite telling myself to leave the book outside the door) or being thrilled to hear dialogue from the novel spoken by the actors. In other words, I was a hopeless viewer, and it was only after I'd left the room that I realised the film might have some special quality of its own. Gupta, Suman; Tope Omoniyi (2007). The Cultures of Economic Migration. Ashgate Publishing. p.33. ISBN 978-0-8122-4146-4. But Ali's talent is far greater than first impressions would suggest. She has a slow-burn style, a winning way of exploring how the contradictions of life gradually build and knit together into experience. Nazneen is not a finished person when she arrives in London as a bride for Chanu, and so it makes sense that Ali's prose style is, until that point, rather naive. But Nazneen is eager to grow up and Ali's prose grows with her, gaining in depth and complexity, gradually creating a compellingly subtle fictional world as Nazneen struggles to make a life for herself within her traditional marriage and the East End immigrant community. Nazneen informs Karim that she does not want to marry him because she is "no longer the girl from the village." Karim leaves broken-hearted and in tears. Nazneen tells the loan shark off, saying she has overpaid the debt her husband owes, and the lady leaves after she refuses to swear on the Quran that they owe more. Their eldest daughter confronts both Chanu and Nazneen about her own desire to stay in London. She then runs off into the streets while a festival is ongoing as her mother runs after her. Nazneen catches up to her at the train station. Chanu and Nazneen share a heart to heart about staying and leaving. Despite always longing for her 'home', Nazneen realizes her home is where her children are happy. Chanu decides that he will leave and that they will follow him at a later date. All sorts of people take offence at all sorts of things. When Irvine Welsh's junkie novel, Trainspotting, was published, some people in Edinburgh objected to the way it portrayed their city. No one took much notice. The feelings of an offended ethnic minority, though (or rather a tiny minority within a minority) rank more highly. Undoubtedly offering to burn books helps. But there is something more fundamental going on here. The white, middle-class good burghers of Edinburgh can look after themselves, but when offence is taken by the underdog those feelings are valued more highly.

We had a little conversation about the authenticity game. "But I'm an actor," he said, justifiably bemused. Part Irish, part Rwandan, part Greek, he'd be waiting perhaps forever for an authentic role to come up. I asked him if he had any qualms about playing Karim. "I like nothing more than a part that requires attention and care for a milieu outside my explicit experience," he said. I took the answer to be no. He said he hoped to bring to bear Karim's "fragility combined with his vigour". This he accomplishes in a performance that delivers both sensitivity and physical energy. Tannishtha and Christopher weave some sort of magic between them to make their relationship seem inevitable rather than merely credible. From her first appearance, Monica Ali has been hailed by critics as that rare thing, “a writer who seemed to have found, right at the beginning of her career and with absolute confidence, her own voice.” (Natasha Walter, The Guardian, 2006) The story of her overnight success is well-known. Even before Ali had completed her famous debut she was signed her up, after her publisher had seen only five chapters of her first draft. Granta reiterated this faith in her skill as a novelist, when it based its decision to name her as one of its 'Best of Young British Novelists' in 2003 on just the manuscript. Since this early popular and critical success, Ali has shown an admirable willingness to wrong-foot and surprise her readers, with novels that have often ranged far beyond the limiting canvas of the ‘British multicultural novel’ template that she helped to establish.Enormously satisfying in its inventions and observations, and its exploration of cultural diversity in Britain. At once touching and satirical…engrossing and enjoyable'. [13]

Ali could have been forgiven for mining this highly popular world of bustling multicultural London for the rest of her career. 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. As with her debut, a varied cast is drawn upon. 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. The break from the third person comes with Chrissie and Eileen’s chapters. These are two British women who have separately settled for unhappy domesticity and the act of giving them first person voices may be interpreted as a means to show that they are counteracting their earlier deference to others. Ali has an impressive command of her story, but her real gift is in the richness of the lives she has created, populating Nazneen's London with a very entertaining cast of comic characters' The Times It appears that some people object to my having written about a Bangladeshi housewife who speaks hardly any English, when I myself am reasonably fluent in the language. I'm far from being the only writer to be accused of failing the "authenticity test". Gautam Malkani, author of Londonstani, was reprimanded last year for writing about Asian homeboys in Hounslow because he is educated and in full-time employment.

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I've seen it again since, and watched it for the first time on a huge screen and with an audience in Toronto. There were around 600 people in the theatre and I confess to concentrating almost as hard on them as the film. They laughed, gasped and snivelled discreetly (or in some cases not so discreetly) and for the first time in my life I began to believe in the wisdom of crowds. Later, Nazneen takes a train to see Karim to tell him that they need to end their relationship. She has come to understand that she’d pieced his personality together like one would a quilt, making him up out of what she’d hoped he would be. Now the seams are showing, and she knows that they do not have a future together. For the most part, he takes the news well, assuming that she is breaking up with him because she can longer bear the thought of sinning against God.