Monica Ali stunned readers and reviewers with her first book, “Brick Lane,” an insightful look at Bengali immigrants in London’s East End. She won several awards and was even placed on the distinguished Granta’s list of best young British novelists. With such an impressive resume, certain assumptions are made, none more important than that the next book will be sure to dazzle.
In “Brick Lane,” the characters were interesting and conflicted, but “Alentejo Blue,” her new novel, doesn’t quite have the shimmer of “Brick Lane.”
Coming from Bangladesh, Ali knew her characters in “Brick Lane.” In “Alentejo Blue,” she didn’t want to write about Bengalis, so she went to Portugal’s Alentejo region and made that the location of her novel. The book is actually a series of vignettes more than a novel.
Characters are tourists, expatriates and local villagers. They all seem interesting, especially if we could get to know them better, but once a character is introduced, we are given their history then shuffled off to meet someone new.
Each character gets to tell his or her own story. The first few stories, around 80 pages of the book, take a lot of patience to get through. The first one is about two ranchers, and apparently, sometimes lovers; but the story never develops. In another, a drunken English writer can’t get any writing done because he’s sleeping with an ex-convict’s wife, as well as her loose daughter. It’s pointless. What makes it worse is that Ali feels it necessary to devote some time to describing the details of a man passing gas as well as other banal bodily functions.
In another early story, there’s a fat café owner ruminating over a stale cake and how the outcome – whether the cake is eaten by him – is a matter of fate. We couldn’t care less either way.
In general, the writing gets better and the characters more interesting, but after struggling through 80 pages, one doesn’t feel up to the trip.
Some characters have depth, and it’s too bad the entire book wasn’t devoted to one of them. Teresa, for instance, is a local villager itching to escape rural constraints. She has been accepted as an au pair for an English couple in London. Before leaving, Teresa plans to lose her virginity to her handsome, though not-so-smart, boyfriend. It’s too bad that the act itself is less than enlightening: “She kept her eyes open the whole time, watching the bamboo ceiling and counting the insects that fell.”
There’s more to Teresa, though, than just her virginity. She is a conflicted character, and we immediately like her. She stands in the door wearing “a white cotton dress with blue flowers that matched the paint that framed the door. Alentejo blue. There she was in a picture, in a moment, setting out for the rest of her life.” We are interested in her and her story, and it seems Ali is too.
The book isn’t entirely bad, and we can even see Ali’s talent shining through, especially her penchant for getting right to the core of people and exposing them. She is unsentimental in her portrayals of people, and she should capitalize on this talent. It’s what made “Brick Lane” so fascinating. To a certain extent, it is the redeeming quality of “Alentejo Blue.”
When Chrissie, the married woman sleeping with the drunken writer, tells her story from her own perspective, she is interesting. When her story is told from the other characters’ perspective, she is pathetic. Most of the characters are this way – repulsive until they tell their own story, and then we care for them, at least a little.
In “Brick Lane,” Ali was a local, but in “Alentejo Blue” she’s a tourist, and it feels at times like it’s a romanticized travel journal rather than a novel. Ali has said that she wanted to remove herself from Bengali culture. It’s understandable that she doesn’t want to get stuck in a cultural niche, although many have had successful careers doing just that.
Ali should at least approach the next book with as much care and insight as she did in “Brick Lane.”
Renee Warner is a freelance writer in Atlanta.
Alentejo Blue
By Monica Ali
Scribner, 240 pages, $25
