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Bound With These Titles
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Summary
Summary
A powerful, funny, richly observed tour de force by one of America's most acclaimed young writers: a story of love and marriage, secrets and betrayals, that takes us from the backyards of America to the back alleys and villages of Bangladesh.
In The Newlyweds, we follow the story of Amina Mazid, who at age twenty-four moves from Bangladesh to Rochester, New York, for love. A hundred years ago, Amina would have been called a mail-order bride. But this is an arranged marriage for the twenty-first century: Amina is wooed by--and woos--George Stillman online.
For Amina, George offers a chance for a new life and a different kind of happiness than she might find back home. For George, Amina is a woman who doesn't play games. But each of them is hiding something: someone from the past they thought they could leave behind. It is only when they put an ocean between them--and Amina returns to Bangladesh--that she and George find out if their secrets will tear them apart, or if they can build a future together.
The Newlyweds is a surprising, suspenseful story about the exhilarations--and real-life complications--of getting, and staying, married. It stretches across continents, generations, and plains of emotion. What has always set Nell Freudenberger apart is the sly, gimlet eye she turns on collisions of all kinds--sexual, cultural, familial. With The Newlyweds , she has found her perfect subject for that vision, and characters to match. She reveals Amina's heart and mind, capturing both her new American reality and the home she cannot forget, with seamless authenticity, empathy, and grace. At once revelatory and affecting, The Newlyweds is a stunning achievement.
Author Notes
Nell Freudenberger is the author of the novel The Dissident and the story collection Lucky Girls, winner of the PEN/Malamud Award and the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; both books were New York Times Book Review Notables. A recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Award, and a Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Fellowship from the New York Public Library, she was named one of Granta 's Best Young American Novelists and one of The New Yorker 's "20 Under 40." She lives in Brooklyn with her family.
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In this cross-cultural, fish-out-of-water tale from Freudenberger, an 11-month courtship consisting of many emails and one exceptionally awkward visit culminates in marriage when 24-year-old Amina Mazid moves from her home in Bangladesh to New York to marry engineer George Stillman. But the couple's new life is anything but perfect. Both Amina and George are harboring secrets and will have to work to prevent the past from ruining the future. Narrator Mozhan Marno turns in a strong performance in this audio, deftly handling the books large cast of characters and switching between Bengali and American accents. Marno also creates a range of voices and speech patterns for the characters, capturing both Amina's fast-talking coworkers in Rochester and the formal diction of her parents. But most importantly, Marno's narration is grounded in Amina's voice and changes with the character as she finally begins to shed her meekness. A Knopf hardcover. (May) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Amina of Dhaka, Bangladesh, meets George of Rochester, New York, on AsiaEuro.com and comes to America to wed. She is smart and disciplined at 24. He is 10 years older, a well-employed loner set in his ways. Her English is excellent, though she claims to find sarcasm difficult to catch even as she slyly employs it. Yes, Amina is a marvelously wily narrator, and Freudenberger (Lucky Girls, 2003; The Dissident, 2006) greatly advances her standing as a writer skilled in understatement and deadpan wit as she continues her signature exploration of the dynamics between Americans and Southeast Asians in this exceptionally intimate, vivid, and suspenseful novel. Methodical and stoic Amina calculates to the day and dollar how long it will take her to become a citizen and save up enough money to bring her parents over, patiently dealing with prejudice, loneliness, and George's limitations until she detects the corrosiveness of secrets and lies. Still, she returns to Bangladesh to collect her parents as planned, only to find that her feckless father is in serious trouble and that her first love is even more compelling than she remembered. This classic tale of missed chances, crushing errors of judgment, and scarring sacrifices, all compounded by cultural differences, is perfectly pitched, piercingly funny, and exquisitely heartbreaking.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
At the end of Nell Freudenberger's second novel, "The Newlyweds," we encounter the following sentence: "I believe that it is only by sharing our stones that we truly become one community." A worthy objective, surely. Nonetheless we're on tricky ground here, and a little probing on our part is called for. The sentence quoted above is in fact part of a Starbucks "Reach for the Stars" writing competition entry attributed to the novel's protagonist, Amina, a Bangladeshi woman who has immigrated to America. But Amina's entry, it turns out, was not actually written by Amina. It was written, and submitted, by Kim, an American cousin of Amina's American husband, George. Kim is a yoga instructor. She is a storyteller, a bit of a liar. Like Freudenberger herself, she has spent time in Soutfi Asia. And Kim is held up, at least partly, as a stand-in for the author: "'But you always wear Indian clothes,' Amina said. "Kim laughed. 'I wear my own version. This kind of thing.' She indicated the bulky sweater she was wearing over an unseasonable cotton dress and a pair of black tights. 'But trust me - I look stupid in a sari.'" Freudenberger is aware of the pitfalls she faces in telling us Amina's tale, and she wants us to be aware of them too. If Kim has invented a competition-winning story as Amina, about Amina, without Amina's permission, and with various inaccuracies, what, Freudenberger invites us to ask, has Freudenberger done? At stake here isn't - or shouldn't be - the question of authenticity, which is a red herring: nationalities, ethnicities, genders and even species do not "own" the right to fictional narratives spoken in what purport to be their voices. Such a proposition, taken to its logical extreme, would reduce fiction to autobiography, and while fiction may well be alive and kicking in the belly of many an autobiography, to confine fiction solely to that domain would be madness. No, the more pressing issue is that of verisimilitude, truthlikeness, the illusion of being real, a quality without which fiction that adheres to the conventions of what is commonly called realism (a problematic term, but useful shorthand for the more cumbersome "let's try not to draw attention to the fact that this is all made up"-ism) starts to feel to its authence like an ill-fitting and spasmodic sock puppet. For despite the subversive wink embodied in Kim - her name of course brings to mind a certain Kipling character who could blend in with the natives but risked occasionally getting caught - the experience of reading "The Newlyweds" remains substantially the experience of reading a work in the realist vein. This is a thirdperson account that hews closely to Amina's point of view. Truthlikeness is thus important to its ambitions. And Freudenberger brings impressive attributes to bear in her attempt to achieve it: a powerful sense of empathy, of being able to imagine what it is to be someone else, to feel what sqmeone else feels; an effective but unfussy writing style that avoids drawing attention to itself; and an international sensibility, which allows her to write about places outside America not as peripheral - mere playgrounds for American characters - but as central to themselves. The novel begins with Amina recently settled in Rochester, checking for her green card in her new mailbox - new, as George says, because of: "Thugs. Potheads. Smoking weed and destroying private property." This vandalism is no directed, racist attack, but a continuing, communitywide problem, one of many symptoms revealing an America where things aren't as good as they used to be. But the past hasn't exactly been wonderful either, not for Amina, and not for George, as may go without saying for a couple who meet online across continents through AsianEuro.com and agree, with barely any physical interaction - and despite obvious differences in nationality, culture and religious upbringing - to wed. Amina and George do have things in common. A certain earnestness. Practicality. 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And, though both try to keep this hidden: abandoned and unfruitful romantic entanglements with "cousins" that, spilling suddenly into the present, threaten to undermine their marriage. On Amina's side there is Nasir. Handsome, tempting and loyal to Amina's increasingly insolvent parents, he has returned to Bangladesh from a stint overseas that included a flirtation with a more conservative, politicized and - to Amina - off-putting form of Islam. Though he is like family, Nasir is not a blood relative but the orphaned son of Amina's father's best friend and comrade-in-arms against brutal Pakistani forces in Bangladesh's 1971 war of independence. George's beautiful cousin Kim is, like Nasir, a biologically plausible mate, in her case because she was adopted. Also like Nasir, she is back from a sojourn abroad, which included minor roles as an exotic extra in Bollywood films and a real-life marriage to a rich Indian and rather compatible lover who, Kim says, "could make me, you know, like every time." SET largely in Dhaka and Rochester, with stopovers in New York City and rural Bangladesh, the love polyhedron that is "The Newlyweds" is at heart a tale of never-ending migrations. Its world is full of mirrors, the refracted similarities conjured up by globalization. Upstate New Yorkers wear elements of South Asian garb to yoga studios, and a young man pulls a Bangladeshi rickshaw in "a lungi and a threadbare black T-shirt with a picture of the Sydney Opera House in neon green." Of the United States immigration bureaucracy, Freudenberger writes: "None of it made any sense....Amina had expected better of America." In Bangladesh even hospitals require bribes. And everywhere there is debt, pressing down hard, and uncertainty, especially over jobs. But differences remain, and one of these lies in attitudes toward relationships between younger adults and the elderly. The final third of the novel recounts Amina's return to Bangladesh and her attempts to bring her parents to America - not just to America, but to live with her and George in their house. George is initially less than thrilled by this idea. His aunt Cathy, on the other hand, grows tearful at the thought: "I think about what's going to happen to me. With the diabetes and my heart ...What I mean is - it's wonderful to have a child who wants to look after you." At moments the truthlikeness of "The Newlyweds" falters, when its perspectives seem to belong more properly to its author than to Amina. Yet as Freudenberger writes (of Amina, but perhaps also of herself): "She had the strange feeling she was lying, even as she told ... the truth." And truths are indeed present in this novel - in its cleareyed openness and compassion toward the world, in its nuanced and human representation of Muslim characters and their varying Islams, and in the understanding and sympathy it displays for the nostalgia of migrants, which is to say for all human beings, even those who are born and the in the same town and travel only in time. This novel's central couple meet on AsianEuro.com and, though they barely know each other, agree to wed. Mohsin Hamid is the author of "Moth Smoke" and "The Reluctant Fundamentalist." His third novel will be published next spring.
Guardian Review
Freudenberger's new novel, like her previous two, is about what its central couple call "cultural differences". George is a 34-year-old American engineer, Amina a 24-year-old Bangladeshi. Their differences range from linguistic trifles (he alarms her by calling the local teenagers who knock over their mailbox "thugs", a word she associates with violent bandits) to the profound (she's not only never had an orgasm, she doesn't even know that it's possible). But their biggest disconnect has to do with their notions of family. Amina regards marriage as a series of surmountable challenges on the road to adulthood. An accomplished if overlong piece of literary naturalism, The Newlyweds feels old-fashioned, as if, like Amina, it were a visitor from another country. That would be the country where readers are willing to devote themselves to pages of expertly rendered depictions of suburban life without much indication of where it's all heading. This is the sort of novel you admire, even though you aren't especially curious to know what happens next - Laura Miller Freudenberger's new novel, like her previous two, is about what its central couple call "cultural differences". George is a 34-year-old American engineer, Amina a 24-year-old Bangladeshi. - Laura Miller.
Kirkus Review
Freudenberger (The Dissident, 2006, etc.) examines a marriage arranged via the Internet. They met on AsianEuro.com: Amina wanted to escape from her family's straitened circumstances in Bangladesh; George wanted someone who "did not play games, unlike some women he knew." So here she is, in the fall of 2005 in the suburbs of Rochester, N.Y., recently married, working in retail while she studies for a teaching certificate. Her husband seems nice, if a little fussy, but he hasn't said any more about converting to Islam as she promised her parents, and they haven't had a Muslim wedding yet either. More disconcerting than any of that, though, is Amina's sense that "she was a different person in Bangla than she was in English," and she's uncertain how to bridge the gulf between these two selves. She makes a much-needed friend in George's cousin Kim, who lived for a while in Bombay and was briefly married to an Indian. Kim understands more about Amina's background and her conflicts than anyone else in Rochester, so when it turns out that she and George have been hiding something important from Amina, it's doubly shattering. However, it does prompt George to agree to bring Amina's parents to America, and she goes to collect them in Bangladesh, where several old family conflicts flare anew. Freudenberger does well in capturing the off-kilter feelings of a young woman in a country so unlike her birthplace, and the cultural differences prompt some enjoyably wry humor. The characters are all well drawn, if a trifle pallid, which points to a larger problem. Freudenberger's tone is detached and cool throughout, even when violent incidents are described, which makes it difficult to emotionally engage with the story. The novel is carefully researched rather than emotionally persuasive. Well executed but a bit too obviously studied--more willed than felt.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Amina grew up in Bangladesh, and her family always dreamed of sending her to the United States. She gets her chance when she meets George, an engineer in Rochester, NY, on an online dating site. As Amina adjusts to married life with the kind but somewhat rigid George, she slowly assimilates to American culture while planning to bring her parents to Rochester. Family feuds in Bangladesh, a rough patch in her marriage, and the economic downturn put this plan in jeopardy. With delicate precision, Freudenberger in her second novel (after The Dissi-dent) slowly builds a story that feels utterly real and present. The subtle and detailed observation of human relations is reminiscent of Alice Munro, and the bittersweet humor and struggles of modern immigrant life are captured in a manner similar to the work of Bharati Mukherjee. VERDICT Other than a deranged cousin in Bangladesh, there are no real villains here, just imperfect humans who don't always make the right choices but do the best they can in their given circumstances. Highly recommended. [See Prepub Alert, 11/28/11.]-Christine DeZelar-Tiedman, Univ. of Minnesota Libs., Minneapolis (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
1 She hadn't heard the mailman, but Amina decided to go out and check. Just in case. If anyone saw her, they would know that there was someone in the house now during the day while George was at work. They would watch Amina hurrying coatless to the mailbox, still wearing her bedroom slippers, and would conclude that this was her home. She had come to stay. The mailbox was new. She had ordered it herself with George's credit card, from mailboxes.com, and she had not chosen the cheapest one. George had said that they needed something sturdy, and so Amina had turned off the Deshi part of her brain and ordered the heavy-duty rural model, in glossy black, for $90. She had not done the conversion into taka, and when it arrived, wrapped in plastic, surrounded by Styrofoam chips, and carefully tucked into its corrugated cardboard box--a box that most Americans would simply throw away but that Amina could not help storing in the basement, in a growing pile behind George's Bowflex--she had taken pleasure in its size and solidity. She showed George the detachable red flag that you could move up or down to indicate whether you had letters for collection. "That wasn't even in the picture," she told him. "It just came with it, free." The old mailbox had been bashed in by thugs. The first time had been right after Amina arrived from Bangladesh, one Thursday night in March. George had left for work on Friday morning, but he hadn't gotten even as far as his car when he came back through the kitchen door, uncharacteristically furious. "Goddamn thugs. Potheads. Smoking weed and destroying private property. And the police don't do a fucking thing." "Thugs are here? In Pittsford?" She couldn't understand it, and that made him angrier. "Thugs! Vandals. Hooligans--whatever you want to call them. Uneducated pieces of human garbage." Then he went down to the basement to get his tools, because you had to take the mailbox off its post and repair the damage right away. If the thugs saw that you hadn't fixed it, that was an invitation. The flag was still raised, and when she double-checked, sticking her hand all the way into its black depths, there was only the stack of bills George had left on his way to work. The thugs did not actually steal the mail, and so her green card, which was supposed to arrive this month, would have been safe even if she could have forgotten to check. "Thugs" had a different meaning in America, and that was why she'd been confused. George had been talking about kids, troublemakers from East Rochester High, while Amina had been thinking of dacoits: bandits who haunted the highways and made it unsafe to take the bus. She had lived in Rochester six months now--long enough to know that there were no bandits on Pittsford roads at night. American English was different from the language she'd learned at Maple Leaf International in Dhaka, but she was lucky because George corrected her and kept her from making embarrassing mistakes. Americans always went to the bathroom, never the loo. They did not live in flats or stow anything in the boot of the car, and under no circumstances did they ever pop outside to smoke a fag. Maple Leaf was where she first learned to use the computer, and the computer was how she met George, a thirty-four-year-old SWM who was looking for a wife. George had explained to her that he had always wanted to get married. He had dated women in Rochester, but often found them silly, and had such a strong aversion to perfume that he couldn't sit across the table from a woman who was wearing it. George's cousin Kim had called him "picky," and had suggested that he might have better luck on the Internet, where he could clarify his requirements from the beginning. George told Amina that he had been waiting for a special connection. He was a romantic, and he didn't want to compromise on just anyone. It wasn't until his colleague Ed told him that he'd met his wife, Min, on AsianEuro.com that he had thought of trying that particular site. When he had received the first e-mail from Amina, he said that he'd "had a feeling." When Amina asked what had given him the feeling, he said that she was "straightforward" and that she did not play games, unlike some women he knew. Which women were those, she had asked, but George said he was talking about women he'd known a long time ago, when he was in college. She hadn't been testing him: she had really wanted to know, only because her own experience had been so different. She had been contacted by several men before George, and each time she'd wondered if this was the person she would marry. Once she and George had started e-mailing each other exclusively, she had wondered the same thing about him, and she'd continued wondering even after he booked the flight to Dhaka in order to meet her. She had wondered that first night when he ate with her parents at the wobbly table covered by the plasticized map of the world--which her father discreetly steadied by placing his elbow somewhere in the neighborhood of Sudan--and during the agonizing hours they had spent in the homes of their Dhaka friends and relatives, talking to each other in English while everyone sat around them and watched. It wasn't until she was actually on the plane to Washington, D.C., wearing the University of Rochester sweatshirt he'd given her, that she had finally become convinced it was going to happen. It was the first week of September, but the leaves were already starting to turn yellow. George said that the fall was coming early, making up for the fact that last spring had been unusually warm: a gift to Amina from the year 2005--her first in America. By the time she arrived in March most of the snow was gone, and so she had not yet experienced a real Rochester winter. In those first weeks she had been pleased to notice that her husband had a large collection of books: biographies (Abraham Lincoln, Anne Frank, Cary Grant, Mary Queen of Scots, John Lennon, and Napoléon) as well as classic novels by Charles Dickens, Cervantes, Tolstoy, Ernest Hemingway, and Jane Austen. George told Amina that he was a reader but that he couldn't understand people who waded through all of the garbage they published these days, when it was possible to spend your whole life reading books the greatness of which had already been established. George did have some books from his childhood, when he'd been interested in fantasy novels, especially retellings of the Arthurian legend and anything to do with dragons. There was also a book his mother had given him, 1001 Facts for Kids , which he claimed had "basically got him through the stupidity of elementary school." In high school he had put away the 1001 Facts in favor of a game called Dungeons & Dragons, but there were now websites that served the same purpose, and George retained a storehouse of interesting tidbits that he periodically related to Amina. "Did you know that there is an actual society made up of people who believe the earth is flat?" "Did you know that one out of twenty people has an extra rib?" "Did you know that most lipstick contains fish scales?" For several weeks Amina had answered "No" to each of these questions, until she gradually understood that this was another colloquialism--perhaps more typical of her new husband than of the English language--simply a way of introducing a new subject that did not demand an actual response. "Did you know that seventy percent of men and sixty percent of women admit to having been unfaithful to their spouse, but that eighty percent of men say they would marry the same woman if they had the chance to live their lives over again?" "What do the women say?" Amina had asked, but George's website hadn't cited that statistic. George had said that they could use the money he'd been "saving for a rainy day" for her to begin studying at Monroe Community College next year, and as soon as her green card arrived, Amina planned to start looking for a job. She wanted to contribute to the cost of her education, even if it was just a small amount. George supported the idea of her continuing her studies, but only once she had a specific goal in mind. It wasn't the degree that counted but what you did with it; he believed that too many Americans wasted time and money on college simply for the sake of a fancy piece of paper. And so Amina told him that she'd always dreamed of becoming a real teacher. This was not untrue, in the sense that she had hoped her tutoring jobs at home might one day lead to a more sustained and distinguished kind of work. What she didn't mention to George was how important the U.S. college degree would be to everyone she knew at home--a tangible symbol of what she had accomplished halfway across the world. She was standing at the sink, chopping eggplant for dinner, when she saw their neighbor Annie Snyder coming up Skytop Lane, pushing an infant in a stroller and talking to her little boy, Lawson, who was pedaling a low plastic bike. The garish colors and balloon-like shapes of that toy reminded Amina of a commercial she had seen on TV soon after she'd arrived in Rochester, in which real people were eating breakfast in a cartoon house. Annie had introduced herself when Amina had moved in and invited her out for coffee. Then she'd asked if Amina had any babysitting experience, because she was always looking for someone to watch the kids for an hour or two while she did the shopping or went to the gym. She asks that because you're from someplace else, George had said. She sees brown skin and all she can think of is housecleaning or babysitting. He told her she was welcome to go to Starbucks with Annie, but under no circumstances was she to take care of Annie's children, even for an hour. Amina was desperate to find a job, but secretly she was glad of George's prohibition. American babies made her nervous, the way they traveled in their padded strollers, wrapped up in blankets like precious goods from UPS. She had never worried about motherhood before, since she'd always known she would have her own mother to help her. When she and George had become serious, Amina and her parents had decided that she would do everything she could to bring them to America with her. Only once they'd arrived did she want to have her first child. They'd talked their plan through again and again at home, researching the green card and citizenship requirements--determining that if all went well, it would be three years from the time she arrived before her parents could hope to join her. Just before she left, her cousin Ghaniyah had shown her an article in Femina called "After the Honeymoon," which said that a couple remained newlyweds for a year and a day after marriage. In her case, Amina thought, the newlywed period would last three times that long, because she wouldn't feel truly settled until her parents had arrived. In spite of all the preparation, there was something surprising about actually finding herself in Rochester, waiting for a green card in the mail. The sight of Annie squatting down and retrieving something from the netting underneath the stroller reminded her that she had been here six months already and had not yet found an opportunity to discuss her thoughts about children or her parents' emigration with George. Excerpted from The Newlyweds by Nell Freudenberger All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
