Burnt Shadows by Kamila Shamsie
Reviewed by Tournament of Books
The Morning News
Powell's Books and The Morning News present the 2010 Tournament of Books
The annual NCAA-style battle between literary titans has begun! And, this year, Review-a-Day will feature a recap of the previous week's battles, judges' comments, and, of course, the winners of each match-up -- every Sunday through March.
With Friday upon us and an exhausting week of battles under our belts, we are now halfway through the opening round. It's been a lot of fun and we've got some exciting results to share! Before we get started, you might want to peek into the judges booth for some pre-game chatter.
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This Week's Featured Battle
 | Battle Date: March 12, 2010 __________ Burnt Shadows, by Kamila Shamsie VS. That Old Cape Magic, by Richard Russo __________ Judged by Nic Brown |  |
Kamila Shamsie's Burnt Shadows is insanely ambitious. It starts with a love scene between a German man and a Japanese woman in Nagasaki on the day of the dropping of the atomic bomb, then somehow ends in Guantanamo Bay, but not until Shamsie first takes on the Partition between India and Pakistan, the end of British colonialism, American C.I.A. agents working in Afghanistan, several iterations of cross-cultural love, and some serious homoerotic tension between British lawyers and their Indian clerks. Much of it is too convenient and unbelievable to work, especially as the book progresses, and as for the end, I can't really say for certain if it's set in Guantanamo Bay or not, because I haven't finished it yet (I have a 17-month-old with a cold, a day job, and a new book to edit -- cut me some slack). But it doesn't really matter. By the end of the first chapter I knew it was going to win.
Let me explain. Shamsie's prose is often beautiful, and she's dealing with Big Ideas here. Of course, therein lie many of the problems in this novel, especially as the dialogue becomes increasing didactic ("Because of you, I understand for the first time how nations can applaud when their governments drop a second nuclear bomb," for example), but I admire what she's trying to accomplish. And I read this book second, so I knew as soon as I encountered her beautiful descriptions ("An old man walks past with skin so brittle Hiroko thinks of a paper lantern with the figure of a man drawn onto it") that it was my favorite. (Read the entire ToB review)
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Additional match-ups from this past week:
Coming up next week:
 | March 15, David Gutowski __________ Wolf Hall VS. An Epic Search For Truth __________ |  |
 | March 16, Molly Young __________ Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned VS. The Anthologist __________ |  |
| March 17, C. Max Magee __________ A Gate At the Stairs VS. The Book of Night Women __________ | 
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| March 18, Kate Ortega __________ Big Machine VS. The Year of the Flood __________ | 
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