Caricamento
House of Sand and Fog
Sintesi
In this riveting novel of almost unbearable suspense, three fragile yet determined people become dangerously entangled in a relentlessly escalating crisis. Colonel Behrani, once a wealthy man in Iran, is now a struggling immigrant willing to bet everything he has to restore his family's dignity. Kathy Nicolo is a troubled young woman whose house is all she has left, and who refuses to let her hard-won stability slip away from her. Sheriff Lester Burdon, a married man who finds himself falling in love with Kathy, becomes obsessed with helping her fight for justice.
Drawn by their competing desires to the same small house in the California hills and doomed by their tragic inability to understand one another, the three converge in an explosive collision course. Combining unadorned realism with profound empathy, House of Sand and Fog marks the arrival of a major new voice in American fiction.
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Recensioni
HOUSE OF SAND AND FOG, by Andre Dubus III, was a blockbuster bestseller nearly 20 years ago, and now that I've finally gotten around to reading it, I can see why. It's a story that begins slowly but quickly picks up momentum and then grabs you by the scruff of the neck and keeps you turning pages deep into the night because you simply HAVE to knw what happens next. I mean, WoW! This is simply one helluva good read.The plot centers around three people. Kathy Lazaro is a thirty-six year old woman who is a recovering drug addict and alcoholic, recently abandoned by her husband. She cleans houses to make ends meet and lives in a small house (the one of the title, inherited from her father) in a coastal village near San Francisco. Due to a clerical error re unpaid taxes, her house is seized by the county and auctioned for a very low price to one Massoud Behrani, a former Colonel in the Iranian Air Force who'd been forced to flee Iran at the time of the revolution there. Kathy is evicted from her home by a Deputy Sheriff, Lester Burdon, who, though married with two children, falls in love with Kathy. A tempestuous, ill-advised affair ensues, as Lester tries to help her get her house back. In the course of the narrative, which shifts from first-persons by both Kathy and Behrani, or an omniscient voice for Lester's portions, the reader gradually learns the history of all three characters, and watches with fascination and horror as things go from bad to worse, building to a climax that will leave you gasping and shaken. There are no absolute villains or heroes here, only people caught up in an unfortunate and tragic web of circumstances, fed by confusion, passion and greed.But enough about the plot. The book has already garnered several hundred reviews at Amazon alone. Dubus is simply a master storyteller who knows how to ratchet up the suspense and demonstrates an uncanny knowledge of human nature, creating characters that are so real they could be living next door. And, even twenty years later, the story remains surprisingly relevant, although there is no mention of cell phones or the internet. Indeed, phone calls are often made from phone booths or public telephones. But here's a sample of HOUSE's continuing relevance, in a comment by Iranian, Colonel Behrani, about -"... the face of Americans, the eyes that never appear satisfied, at peace with their work, or the day God has given them; these people have the eyes of very small children who are forever looking for their next source of distraction, entertainment, or a sweet taste in the mouth. And it is no longer to me a surprise that it is the recent immigrants who excel in this land, the Orientals, the Greeks, and yes, the Persians. We know rich opportunity when we see it." Yeah, that "immigrant thing" - twenty years ago. Actually even further back, as this story likely takes place in the early 90s - the only clue to the era that I could find was that Behrani's 14 year-old son had been a babe in arms when he and his family fled Tehran at the time of the revolution, which was in 1979.This was a fascinating, absorbing and absolutely compelling read, much deserving of its great success. My highest recommendation. - Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER
Up next an uplifting book about a cop chasing a serial killer.Seriously. Almost anything would be less bleak and tragic than this story. About a third of the way in you will realize that no one can come out of this situation well. No one. It’s easy to sympathize with the Behrani family who came to the US when the Shah was deposed in Iran. He was a Colonel in the air force and thought it would be easy to get a job with Boeing or McDonnell Douglas here, but he didn’t. He’s been fooling the world with fake wealth for years in an effort to get their daughter married well. Now she has, dad quits his menial jobs (of which his whole family are ignorant) and invests their remaining savings in a foreclosed house. All well and good. Except that house was foreclosed on in error. A literal typo - wrong address. Still, the house is legally his and his whole future hinges on being able to sell it at a profit.The former owner, Kathy, has little recourse except to sue the county. You’d think there’d be sympathy for her, too, but it’s her own fault. She willfully threw away county letters unopened. If she’d read at least one of them the entire disaster could have been avoided. Depressed that her husband left her, she can’t be bothered. She goes to legal aid to see what she can do now it’s gone too far and is delusional and pig-headed about her standing. It was really hard to feel bad for her at all. Then there’s Lester. The deputy sheriff on hand for her eviction. He falls for her and systematically throws away his marriage, his kids, his job and finally his freedom for this woman. Sure, the sex is hot, but the fog doesn’t only obliterate the landscape, but possibly good sense as well. Both of them are so self-destructive and stupid that they deserve each other. It’s just so much sadder that they take everyone else down with them. Fog is mentioned a lot in the novel and it is a lovely metaphor for everyone’s cloudy judgment and rationality. They’re all crazy and blinded by emotions and cultural misunderstandings. If it wasn’t so gut-wrenchingly awful it would be funny.Dubus can write the paint off the walls though. The story is told with three main narratives - Kathy’s, Lester’s and the Colonel’s. Managing the variegated syntax of this last story was really perfect. I think he had help from folks who speak Farsi and he tweaked the sentence rhythms and structures just perfectly. By way of context you can tease out the meaning of many Farsi words and phrases peppered throughout. It really was a beautiful piece of writing even if the subject of that writing wasn’t always beautiful.
I believe I've found a new (to me) author who writes VERY good fiction. Thank you, Julie Cowles, for lending me this dark book in which various characters try to do the next right thing but everything gets totally messed up
Overwrought.
Less than thrilled at the liver and onion dinner (with no dessert!) that her mother prepares one day, Lisabeth finds that her complaints are met with yet another reference to her mother's own perfect childhood. This time however, When-I-was-a-little-girl actually materializes, as a kind of ghostly visitor! Neatly dressed, perfectly well-behaved, and a maddening contrast to the girl's own rough and tumble appearance and behavior, When-I-was-a-little-girl stays clean, when Lisabeth plays in the mud, and seems to love the foods that Lisabeth hates. Finally, deeply unhappy at this unwelcome visitor from her mother's past, Lisabeth phones her grandmother for help...A humorous picture-book exploration, from the child's perspective, of parental criticism, and the comparisons that such criticism sometimes involves - who hasn't heard the old 'when I was your age' type comment, from an elder? - Rachna Gilmore's When-I-was-a-little-girl is also a sensitive depiction of the way in which the memory can play tricks on us. As it turns out, Lisabeth's Grandmother remembers When-I-was-a-little-girl a little differently than her mother, making her 'retirement' - Mom sighed. She turned to When-I-was-a-little-girl and said, "Maybe it's time for you to go now" - both satisfying (for the child reader), and educational (for the adult one).With a narrative that has something to offer both children and adults, and appealing illustrations that capture Lisabeth's emotional ups and downs (Renné Benoit did a similarly wonderful job with Lily and the Paper Man), this is a book I would recommend to young readers who are tired of being compared to others, and to the adults in their lives, who may not realize the impact that such comparisons have.
This is a really amazing look in to the lives of three characters effected by one house. There's the accesivly rich former Iranian dictator Colonel Baheemie who purchaces the forclosed hose once owned by hard on her luck Kathy. It is through her new cop boyfriend Lester's observation that the colonal and his family are living in her house in extremem accivieness wile she is living out of a storage shed and cheep motel hoping. Having been an under priveledged kid from a small border town, he feel empathy for her, so he goes to confront the colonal, as Kahty is struggling to pull bakc togethe her life. There is a strong prelevent theme of moral ethical delemas troughouth the book, that makes the reader very empathedic to the characters.
Rating: 4.75* of fiveThe Book Report: Behrani. An exiled colonel in the Shah's army. Kathy. A fucked-up druggie living off her inheritance. Lester. A major idiot whose law-enforcement career is his last best shot at staying off welfare.Not one of these people will leave this book better than they entered it. Kathy's only home is the one she inherited, and the county says it's not hers anymore because she hasn't paid the taxes. She has, though. She's completely unable to function in the world because she's hazed on drugs for so long that even when she's clean she can't think straight. That means she can't figure out how to prove she has complied with the law.Behrani can't get an American life going. He has savings (one hesitates to imagine where the money came from originally) that barely keep him afloat, and jobs that demean him but are all a man with no skills except being an Army officer can get. But his son's college money is sufficient to buy a distressed property at auction. Kathy's home, as it turns out. He plans to renovate and flip it, using this as a stepping-stone to American Dream-level prosperity.Lester comes in as the deputy assigned to be sure Kathy gets out of the home that's no longer hers. Love at first sight! Lame-o Lester and Loser Kathy...surely the white trash Romeo and Juliet!Pretty much.Dubus drags us through the legal system as the parties battle out the rights and wrongs of the case. No one here is a good person, just a greedy selfish prick who deserves what, in the end, is meted out to them by the author's just and pitiless exercise of karmic debt collection.My Review: NOT an uplifting book. My withers were wrung about every twenty pages, and I took frequent breaks in order to console myself with excessive liquor consumption and sordid sexual escapades.I love a book that brings out the best in me.There's a scene where Lame-o Lester gets his first-ever BJ from Loser Kathy, which Dubus goes into in a bizarrely flat and affectless way that completely desxualizes the act, makes it a symptom of a pathology and not an erotic or intimate or even sexy development. It's just part of the sickness pervading these broken, unfixable people's existences.Did you *get* that? A man wrote about the thing most men want more than food and only slightly less than air, and made it *unappealing*.Dubus is a master of his craft. He is an artist. He can do anything he wants with words to make them dance in the reader's head to HIS tune, screw whatever you were expecting, reader! He can fashion a story that, in its outlines, sounds juicy and ripe with conflict, and make it a sharp object that will deflate whatever happy illusions were still in your head about yourself and this Murrikin Dream we're supposed to be having, reader!And that is why you should read this book.
ordinary people (is anybody really "normal"?) that end up meeting in a dark, dark place. This is a chilling story but one that is frighteningly very believable...What i found interesting was that, while none of the characters were perfect, I could side with them all for the feelings that they had.
Ticks up the tension like a precision-engineered timepiece. Character is destiny. Or character plus circumstances equals destiny.Found the POV of the immigrant colonel more convincing than Kathy's. Could be that I don't know much about the nature of addiction and falling off a speeding wagon.
Beautiful read- loved it!
A very tormenting story.
I read the first 100 pages of House of Sand and Fog and then had to put it down. The plot is built on the stupidity of the female lead, Kathy, who deliberately discards all mail received from county taxation and subsequently is surprised when she loses her home to auction for unpaid taxes. She decides she needs a married cop (second protagonist) to help get her house back, so she seduces one. Meanwhile, a Persian colonel (third protagonist), living far beyond his means in an upscale California neighbourhood, has purchased the hosue at auction; him I found equally unlikeable.
I liked this slow burner which focuses on three people caught in what might have been a mundane legal dispute but which spirals shockingly out of control as the story reaches its conclusion. The writing is dense, every little detail keenly observed. Not a fast read, but an enjoyable and illuminating one.
This is a pretty dark and depressing novel involving a snowball effect of bad decisions among several parties.
I read this, or rather listened to the audio version, some time ago so this review is based on past impressions. I recall that I was expecting more because it received such good reviews. It's told from two points of view - a woman who loses her beloved house and the man who moves into it with his family. I was kind of okay with this novel until the end, which pretty much ruined it for me. On the plus side, the audio version was well done.
This book was like watching a train wreck in slow motion. I started it months before I finally picked it up and finished it. Tragic and compelling. I was angry at the main female character from the beginning, and felt compassion for the family who came to occupy her house, although there was fault on their side as well. The ending was terrible.The author certainly knew how to command the reader's attention. He did a good job of showing two opposing sides of an argument. The writing was very good, it was the story itself that bothered me.
The first part of the book is told in alternating voices. Colonel Behrani is an Iranian who escaped the country after the Shah was overthrown. A rich and powerful man in Iran, he works two jobs to attempt to maintain his family's lifestyle, make a good match for his daughter, and pay for his son's education. Kathy Nicolo is a recovering alcoholic and cocaine addict whose husband has recently left her. Her house is mistakenly repossessed and purchased by Colonel Behrani. As the story unfolds through the eyes of these two character, the tension builds. There is not a lot of action in the book, but Dubus managed to keep me quickly turning pages. The tone of the book changes a bit in the second part. Kathy's boyfriend, Deputy Sheriff Lester Burdon lends his voice to the story (although his chapters are told in the third person). The characters make a series of bad decisions, leaving readers wondering how Dubus will possibly resolve their conflicts. At times, I felt like I was in the middle of a bad dream, unable to change what was happening and unable to turn away. And then the book ends (and not in the most satisfying way, but perhaps in the only way possible). This is not an unbeat book. I didn't identify with any of the characters, and I found no hope in the decisions that they made. But even so, I have to appreciate this book. With each wrong turn, I wanted to scream at the characters, but I didn't doubt that they would have made that particular wrong turn. Dubus held my attention from start to finish.
Very sad. Could really happen. Couldn't put it down.
OK, but not as good as hyped up to be. Kinda of a dark beach read.
It`s hard to read a book with no hero at all, not even a leader, and it didn`t got better at the end. Left me with a very frustrating feeling.
Hard to pinpoint what made this the best book in a long time. The main character, an Iranian was immediately fascinating, and you were on his side within a couple of pages. The atmosphere seemed ordinary--modern-day California, but the author's descriptions made it dreamy for me. Tried to be sympathetic to the irritating woman who loses her house, but I was rooting for the Iranian already. The ending was hard to accept, and I wished for a different outcome.
I really did not like this book when I first started it. It took me about 100 pages to get into it, but after that, I found it okay. I thought it was very well-written. I wouldn't use the word enjoyable to describe this because it's an incredibly depressing book. It's hard for me to really say what I feel about this one. I guess I liked it but I had a lot of problems with the plausibility of many of the developments in the book (e.g. the romance between Kathy and Lester and pretty much everything about the ending). I really did not enjoy the ending but in a way, it seemed to be the inevitable conclusion. I can't really imagine another ending to this tragic tale. I don't know. I'm really confused about my feelings on this one. Perhaps it was just too unsettling for me to admit that I actually liked it more than I disliked it.
Probably not the best book to be reading while in the process of purchasing a foreclosed home...An error at the tax agency forces one woman, Kathy out of her house. At the same time a hard working Persian man, Behrani takes advantage of a house that has been auctioned off. Both main characters in this book are stubborn. Lester is the deputy who takes part of forcing Kathy out of her home. He has a wife and a father of two. He goes ga-ga for Kathy and will do anything and everything to get Kathy back in her home. Mr. Behrani is willing to sell back the home he purchased but only for a profit. Lester and Kathy are convinced that Behrani family is wealthy and does not need the house. The story switches back from Kathy and Behrani narrating. Kathy who is struggling and can barely afford to stay in cheap motorlodges ends up bunking up at a fishing cabin with Lester. She falls off the wagon and more trouble ensues. All of this could have been avoided if Kathy hadn't thrown away those notices from the tax bureau!
I tend not to like books about people who seem incapable of making good decisions. And one of the characters in this book is definitely like that. She just never seems able (or willing) to take any responsible action. Realistic this may be, but it's also annoying.Another main character, on the other hand, tends to make good decisions. Decisions that are responsible financially, good for his family, and on the right side of the law. And yet, things don't turn out well for him either.If this is a book the purpose of which is to show how quickly things can spiral out of control, then it succeeds. Good decisions or bad, no-one wins here. Too many of us, who manage to have lives that are more or less in control, this is a valuable thing to learn about. But this is an awfully depressing education.
A very engrossing novel. The characters and their clashing cultures and mindsets are very detailed and almost spellbinding. I read this in a two day binge. The story concerns a dispute over a house that was seized for non-payment and then bought by an Irani family with the last of their money for an investment. The original owner inherited the house from her family but she loses it to the county after her husband abandons her. The third main character is the sheriff's deputy who falls in love with the owner and tries to help her get the house back. The tension is high throughout the story; you are never quite sure what to expect. Great read.
Pretty much the worst book I've ever read. Not one of the characters deserves any sympathy from the reader.
I didn't enjoy this at all. It's a simple plot but not simply told. The characters are interesting but do nothing interesting.
Haunting characters and story. Outstanding read.
At the beginning of House of Sand and Fog, a recovering alcoholic named Kathy is evicted from her California home. The Behranis, an Iranian immigrant family, buy the house at auction the next day. Kathy discovers her eviction was due to a clerical error, and launches a legal battle to regain ownership. The Behranis, of course, fight to keep what they now rightfully own. Meanwhile Kathy, recently abandoned by her husband, becomes entangled in a relationship with Lester, a married police officer who was present at her eviction. With each chapter the situation spirals more and more out of control. First, cultural misunderstandings abound: Kathy and Lester are frightened by the Behranis' ties to the Shah's regime, and the Behranis harbor resentment towards privileged, white Americans. Second, every main character makes a mess of their personal relationships through poor communication and allowing their egos to get in the way. This ominous, tense, and gritty novel reads like a Shakespearean tragedy. While there are many opportunities for the characters to improve their situation, they repeatedly fail to do so. Each character's flaws are glaringly obvious, and none of them are particularly likeable. As the reader, this made me distance myself emotionally from the plot, remaining on the sidelines watching the characters careen towards the inevitable disaster. This book is well-written but I tend to prefer novels where I can be more emotionally committed to the outcome.
Wow, how do you sum up the emotions that this book churns up?A friend asked me if I liked the book and I couldn't answer her. A good book, in my opinion, is a story that makes you want to read nonstop, you are obsessed with the characters, you know the characters as well as you know your friends and when the book is over you wish that you had just one more chapter....... Well this book had all of that, BUT.... How depressing can a story be? My heart broke for every single character in the story. Every person lost everything because of a house!!!!! I actually lost sleep thinking about these people.