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This book left me with quite mixed feelings to be honest. I wanted to love it, it’s been compared to White Teeth by Zadie Smith which is one of my all time faves, but I thought it lacked the vibrancy and liveliness of White Teeth, despite both of them portraying the lives of immigrants in London.
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Brick Lane follows Nazneen, a Bangladeshi woman who moves to London for an arranged marriage. I think the slowness of the book comes from the passivity of Nazneen, as she doesn’t really do much for much of the first half. Her husband, Chanu, is such an interesting character though. He is tragic, annoying, inspiring, and hilarious all at once, and I really felt for him trying to find an outlet for his passions in a system where he doesn’t feel appreciated!
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My favourite parts of the book were the passages describing anecdotes from Nazneen’s childhood in Bangladesh - I wish there were more of them! The letters from Hasina, Nazneen’s sister, were also interesting (not to mention heartbreaking) but the extremely stilted English that they’re written in is off-putting and tiresome to read. It seemed to me that the first batch were written far better than all the others - her writing seemed to deteriorate, I thought it was inconsistent.
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Overall, plenty of compelling parts, such as Nazneen’s friend Razia’s struggle with her wayward son, but too many dry patches that dragged, and a romantic subplot that I didn’t care for. Ali did a great job of depicting the rising racial tensions in the early 2000s though!
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