A Golden Age

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Ca poveste, romanul este frumos, vocea Rehanei te atrage intr-o istorisire simpla, o descriere usor naiva a unor evenimente dramatice (cand profesori si intelectuali erau executati la Universitate, personajele noastre mananca byiriani si o casatoresc pe Sylvie).

Born in 1975 into the Bangladesh cultural elite and educated internationally, Anam is too young to have experienced her homeland’s drive for independence and war with Pakistan in 1971. Her chosen mission in her two acclaimed novels to date has therefore been to present the story of her parents’ generation for a new audience. The research for both her books comes partly from interviews she conducted with family members and Bangladeshis who experienced the conflict. This is a fictional take on the Liberation war of 1971. I'm sure many people in the world are unaware of the magnitude of horror that took place in our small country. This book must have put it on people's radar, and maybe inspired them to get to know about our nation a little better. For that, I am grateful. Roy, Amit (5 June 2011). "Eye on England: Good Author". The Telegraph. Kolkota. Archived from the original on 14 August 2014 . Retrieved 17 October 2012. Then, I did not understand, Why maya, who is a member of communist party and a supporter of Mukti Judha did not want to shelter Major!! Sudden mood change due to hormonal imbalance? Right after the partition in 1947, when East Pakistan and west Pakistan was born, there was too much contrast between two parts of Pakistan in all shape and form, which gradually formed into a very chaotic political situation followed by unequal distribution of resources . It took It's extreme in 1971. From genocide to mass rape we had to go through all sort of degradation to achieve our freedom. Set on that turbulent time span, A Golden Age is the story of Rehana, a middle aged muslim woman and a mother of two grown up child, caught in the midst of violent atmosphere of 71. Anam, choosing the zoomed in scenery of an upper middle class family, brilliantly connected the conflict and struggle at familial level to the much bigger story of revolution. Rehana is not politically active, but she is protective of her children. But what started with an utter maternal instinct soon got the hangover of revolution. It's well observed and executed. But as Anam did not have the first hand experience (as she was born and grew up in foreign country) some emotions felt overly done at some point. Overall It's a good story. A perfect 4 star read.a b c d e Burton-Hill, Clemency. "And ne'er the twain shall meet". The Guardian . Retrieved 2015-07-22. It was the day of the tenth celebration party for her two children's return, when the gun fire started in the city and keep on thundering for the next nine months in 1971. That those nine months of the war were like nine generations, brimming with lives and deaths; that Sohail had survived, while his friends had died; and that here was the city, burned and blistered and alive, where she was going to see what remained of the man with the scar across his face who had lived in her house for ninety-six days and passed like a storm through her small life. In the book, Rehana's reasons for giving over her house are more complex than mere commitment to a cause: Early in the book, we learn that she once lost custody of her children. After their return, her devotion to them was boundless, but that devotion is tested when, in the midst of war, Rehana falls in love.)

At the age of 17, she received a scholarship for Mount Holyoke College, from which she graduated in 1997. [6] [8] She earned a PhD in anthropology from Harvard University in 2005 for her thesis "Fixing the Past: War, Violence, and Habitations of Memory in Post-Independence Bangladesh." [9] Later, she completed her Master of Arts in creative writing at Royal Holloway, University of London. [8] [4] Career [ edit ] Is Bangladesh turning fundamentalist?' – and other questions I no longer wish to answer". The Guardian. To research the story, Anam interviewed people who had lived through the war. In 1971, long-simmering hostilities between East and West Pakistan began boiling over. Separated from West Pakistan by language, culture and the expanse of India, East Pakistan chafed under the dominance of the West. When East Pakistan's Awami party won an overwhelming victory in national elections, leaders in the West refused to allow a new parliament to convene. East Pakistani nationalists took to the streets to protest. We never know what makes Sohail call the struggle "the very worst thing we have ever done", just as we never know all the stories captured in Rehana's allusion to "the boys running around with guns, their hearts hungry for revenge". But these references are part of a strategy of opening the windows of our imaginations to all that exists outside attempts to make narratives of war neat and uncomplicated. Even when the cause of war is just, the price paid is terrible. I did lots of research for my first book which carried over to the second”, Anam has stated, “I prefer to ask people who were there about their experiences; I don’t like to use books, unless they’re memoirs or testimonials. I ask people the little details, about what they wore, what brand of cigarettes they smoked, what music they listened to, maybe the car they drove. And then I try and forget the research, so the reader doesn’t ever feel like I’ve just given a history lesson. I want the research to be in there, to be accurate, but not felt in a palpable way. I think the only time you notice research is when the illusion of the past gets broken, and I’m trying to avoid that.” ( Bookslut, July 2011)

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In 2016, her novel The Bones of Grace was published by HarperCollins. [17] The following year, she was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. [18] [19] Anam's op-ed pieces have been published in The New York Times, The Guardian and in the New Statesman. In these, Anam has written about Bangladesh and its growing problems. [20] [21] [22] Rehana’s relationships with her neighbours, her children and wider family are portrayed skilfully, always rich and alive, if not always affectionate. Her life centres around her household, and that remains true even when revolution breaks out and she finds herself sheltering freedom fighters. I had read earlier, in an interview, that the inspiration for the story was the real-life events of the writer's grandmother during the war. Tahmima Anam has beautifully created an atmosphere of war and instability throughout the book. One of the main things you will notice while reading the book is that the writer always tells us how the environment in the book smells. It actually helped me to be involved with the story and its settings. I lost our children today.What an opening line. Tahmima Anam's A Golden Age plunges you right into the twin events that form the basis of Rehana's character as a parent, fiercely protective and determined to have them near her. The death of her husband and her fight to keep her children, when her dead husband's brother and his childless wife claim they could take better care of them.

I did not know even the most solid facts of this history. My ignorance is all the more embarrassing since I live in an area of London with a large Bengali community and count Bengali folks among my students & their families. One of the things I find most frustrating about myself is that my memory will not hold dates, will not hold a timeline, seems radically inhospitable to histories. I find it very difficult to read historical non-fiction. I need a novel, or at least a memoir, a personal story that I can feel along with, to absorb even the simplest information about past events. Tahmima Anam has offered that here, threading the line of a history with beads of life. Our protagonist, Rehana, is an unintentional hero, pushed by circumstance to be extraordinarily courageous when all she wants is a life of wholeness and peace.Trained at Harvard as a professional anthropologist, Tahmima Anam’s historical novels about Bangladesh are works of intensive research and inspired ventriloquism. a b Gorra, Michael (27 January 2008). "Birth of a Nation". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331 . Retrieved 2018-12-16. And so Tahmima Anam's grandmother provided food and shelter for the young fighters. While the young men went off on missions, Shaheen Anam stayed home. The atmosphere in the house, she says, was more exhilarating than terrifying. But one morning, the Pakistani army came, looking for her brother. The mounting Bengali nationalist movement led to the Pakistan army to carry out Operation Searchlight. This military operation targeted Bengali intellectuals, academics including university students, and Hindus. They were captured, tortured, and/or killed. [5] This led to the 1971 Bangladesh genocide that caused millions of refugees to flee to India and the deaths of 58,000 to 3,000,000 civilians. The exact number of deaths is still unknown. [5] [10] Parveen Haque: Faiz's wife. She cannot have children so works to have Rehana seen as unfit after the death of Iqbal so that she have get custody of Sohail and Maya. [4]

It's a fabulous and compelling novel of a family disrupted by war, thrown into the dangers of standing up for what they believe is right, influenced by love, betrayed by jealousies and of a young generation's desire to be part of the establishment of independence for the country they love. I love reading about food, and this novel was very satisfying on that score, with every meal at least briefly described. Food is a carrier of emotion and often expresses what can't be said. In a moment of crisis Rehana assesses her stores and decides she can feed her family for five days, then she finds that her Hindu tenant is sheltering a group of twenty or thirty refugees, and she immediately uses all her supplies preparing hot vegetarian food for them. This kind of generosity, characteristic of Rehana, and, in my real life and literary experience, par for the course among Muslims, is striking and moving to me. Rather than depicting the events of Bangladesh independence, i.e. the split between East and West Pakistan in 1971, the central theme is a mother’s efforts to save her children. There is too little history. On the other hand, I just finished another book concerning how war wreaks havoc in people’s lives, Scribbling The Cat, and that I loved. That didn’t have a lot about the exact historical events of the Rhodesian War, but I still loved it, so something else must be wrong. The central theme here, in the book about Bangladesh, is that all can be sacrificed except her children. The mother will do almost anything for her children. I think I couldn’t relate to that. In Fuller’s book I felt that the author was revealing her own search for coping with war experiences, not only K’s. I think I was touched by her honesty and willingness to reveal herself. In A Golden Age, by Tahmima Anam, the mother reveals herself honestly; it is clear that she has made questionable choices, done things she shouldn’t have done, but she remained only a fictional character for me.

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The main character in the book is the widowed Rehana, a non-Bengali who lives in Dhaka. Both of her children become involved in the struggle against Yahya’s forces. She tries to maintain her home as things gradually deteriorate all around her and her children become ever more deeply embroiled in the resistance to the murderous thugs (including her brother-in-law whose home was in West Pakistan), who had invaded their country. At first, I was lulled into thinking that Rehana was an innocent in a sea of turmoil, but as the tale unwinds, I learned that she also harboured secrets, some of which had nothing to do with the invasion of Yahya’s forces. In March 2007, Anam's first novel, A Golden Age, was published by John Murray. Inspired by her parents, she set the novel during the Bangladesh Liberation War. It was finalist for the Costa First Novel Award. The novel tells the story of a woman named Rehana Haque during the Bangladesh War of Independence in 1971. [10] She had also researched the war during her post-graduation career. For the benefit of her research, she stayed in Bangladesh for two years and interviewed hundreds of war fighters, known as shongram fighers. She also worked on the set of Tareque and Catherine Masud’s critically acclaimed film Matir Moina ( The Clay Bird), which reflects the events during that war. [11] Ultimately, even in the darkness of war there is light, as 'in the midst of all this madness,' Rehana realises, 'I found the world seemed right for the first time in a very long time'. This sense of the world turning cannot help but be reflected by the nature of the land in question. 'Every year,' Rehana observes, 'the land will turn to sea as it disappears under the spell of water, and then prevail again, as if by magic, and this refrain, this looping repetition, is the archive of its long, flood-turned history.' Until the end of 1971, Bangladesh, inhabited mainly by Bengalis, was known as ‘East Pakistan’. West Pakistan, now all that remains of Pakistan is, and was inhabited by a Punjabi majority. In 1970, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman (‘Mujib’,a Bengali) and his party won the parliamentary elections. Mujib was prevented from taking office by President General Yahya Khan, of West Pakistan, who along with many of his fellow Punjabis and Pathans held the Bengalis in low regard. He arrested Mujib in early 1971 and launched a vicious military assault on East Pakistan. Its aim was to decimate the Bengali population. During this operation, about a million East Pakistanis fled to neighbouring India and anything between 30,000 and 3,000,000 East Pakistanis were massacred. Had it not been for the intervention of Indian armed forces, many more would have been killed. By the end of 1971, Yahya’s forces were defeated; Mujib was released, and soon after this East Pakistan divorced itself from West Pakistan and the republic of Bangladesh was born. The novel ‘The golden age.’ has very critical name because I could not understand when a country is under military reign and the most fierce suppression, from which angle the time seems to be ‘golden’?