RSSBrick Lane, by Monica Ali
What could not be changed must be borne. And since nothing could be changed, everything had to be borne. That principle ruled her life. It was mantra, fettle, and challenge. So that, at the age of thirty-four, after she had been given three children and had one taken away, when she had a futile husband and had been fated a young and demanding lover, when for the first time she could not wait for the future to be revealed but had to make it for herself, she was as startled by her own agency as an infant who waves a clenched fist and strikes itself upon the eye.
With this passage in the first chapter of Brick Lane, author Monica Ali neatly lays out the tale of Nazneen, a Bangladeshi emigrant who finds her way through a quiet life in an arranged marriage in a tenement apartment on East London’s Brick Lane.
Some of my favorite fiction allows me to inhabit, for a time, lives and cultures that are very different from my own. That fiction succeeds most when it offers me insight into the kinds of decisions and lives to which I imagine I would never be a party. Why live a confined life in a tiny, cluttered apartment when a city like London lays at your doorstep? We are women, hear us roar: Why cast life’s path to fortune when you could make it yourself? Through Brick Lane, Ali guided me gently to answers I hadn’t considered before, and I found myself the broader minded for it.
There are parts of Brick Lane that do feel contrived. Letters to Nazneen from her sister Hasina, who pays a steep price after leaving home to avoid her own arranged marriage, provide an alternately stilted and compelling counterbalance to Nazneen’s stifling domestic routine. Hasina’s choices land her squarely and dangerously in a House of Falling Women—a shelter for Bangladeshi women without husbands, who work in factories or rock quarries, or in shadowy doorways as prostitutes. Her bleak situation makes it easier to understand Nazneen’s dutiful attendance to husband Chanu and his personal hygiene and habits that dominate her mostly domestic life.
However, in spite of occasional contrivance, in the balance, Ali achieves her insights with grace. Those letters from Hasina provide the reader with the same relief from Nazneen’s claustrophobic life that they do for Nazneen. And by the time I turned the book’s final pages, I was surprised at by the emotional weight of the realization that a series of seemingly small victories had become a life transformed.
Monica Ali will be on tour in June to promote the U.S. release of her new novel, Alentejo Blue, which, according to Buzz Girl, chronicles the lives of residents in a small Portuguese village.