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The Newlyweds
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.
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.
337 pages, Hardcover
First published May 1, 2012
About the author
Nell Freudenberger
12 books379 followersNell 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.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 1,355 reviews
April 29, 2019
I read this!!! I thought I wrote a review.
I liked it!
Engaging storytelling and characters!!!
I can’t remember what I rated it....
But I do remember enjoying the author’s writing which is why I am now reading
“Lost and Wanted”.
I’m guessing I rated it 4 or 5 stars. I still own the Hard copy.
I liked it!
Engaging storytelling and characters!!!
I can’t remember what I rated it....
But I do remember enjoying the author’s writing which is why I am now reading
“Lost and Wanted”.
I’m guessing I rated it 4 or 5 stars. I still own the Hard copy.
July 8, 2012
This is a pathetic book. Being from the subcontinent, I resent being represented by the shallow, cold-hearted, calculating bitch that's the so-called protagonist in this novel. Had she been cast as not a Deshi but another American, which truly would have been easy, she would be the vamp. If she was still the protagonist, the author would at least not have pretended that she could do no wrong. Instead we get this horrible person unselfconsciously bitching and moaning about everyone else but her. Truth be told, I preferred everyone in the book, including her supposed "Devil" aunt Moni, to her. There are several major problems with the book.
First of all, there is the incongruity of a Deshi protagonist written by someone who stayed there for a bit. So Amina is really more American than she is a Bangladeshi Muslim. Her religion is a convenience, not really a part of her. Her country is involved, but in a touristy sort of way - not with any real understanding. Well, if you were going to write a novel about cultures clashing, at least write with the point of view of the culture you are a part of. The way Amina is written, she comes across as a sly, manipulative, entitled, grabbing, gold digging bitch. Worse, that this is somehow ok because she's from poor old Bangladesh.
Second, there is the hopeless case of having a multicultural novel but one where there is no culture clash. In fact, Amina and her husband George use cultural differences as an excuse to not fight. So, why even bring Bangladesh into the picture if not to win awards and acclaim by confused people or to stand somehow above mediocre romance novels that are actually better than this pile of junk? No reason really - Amina's problem with her husband is that he once had an affair with his cousin (who was adopted). The cousin is a nice enough but slightly troubled woman who goes out of her way to be friendly - with Amina, not George. He does not stray during the wedding, he isn't even excessively affectionate towards the woman, but Amina punishes him anyway. Laughably, she moralizes that her husband is someone who thinks that a lie is a lie only when spoken out loud. Yet, when Amina does far worse than her husband, she doesn't own up to it either - but her affair (adulterous, this one) that goes nowhere is poignant, not squalid like her husband damn it! I cannot even, the affair where a married Amina throws herself at Nasir, fails to feel any guilt, is disappointed because Nasir exercises more restraint than her is somehow more elevated than her husband's past affair with his cousin when he was unattached.
With the affair comes the next problem. We spend 300 of a 330 pages book reading as Amina says again and again how her teenage crush for Nasir had fled out of the window. Her considerations are calculating - Nasir has an unmarried sister who's ready to play mother-in-law to anyone Nasir marries. Yet, the moment she sees Nasir again, she LOVES him - don't try to argue! Did his sister vanish into thin air? And what were her parents thinking? Why go stay at a single man's house with your daughter who was supposed to marry him at one time? Which sane parent would do that? Aargh - the more I think, the more problems I have with this tripe - and it's really not worth the time I'm putting into it.
Bye bye Nell Freudenberger.
First of all, there is the incongruity of a Deshi protagonist written by someone who stayed there for a bit. So Amina is really more American than she is a Bangladeshi Muslim. Her religion is a convenience, not really a part of her. Her country is involved, but in a touristy sort of way - not with any real understanding. Well, if you were going to write a novel about cultures clashing, at least write with the point of view of the culture you are a part of. The way Amina is written, she comes across as a sly, manipulative, entitled, grabbing, gold digging bitch. Worse, that this is somehow ok because she's from poor old Bangladesh.
Second, there is the hopeless case of having a multicultural novel but one where there is no culture clash. In fact, Amina and her husband George use cultural differences as an excuse to not fight. So, why even bring Bangladesh into the picture if not to win awards and acclaim by confused people or to stand somehow above mediocre romance novels that are actually better than this pile of junk? No reason really - Amina's problem with her husband is that he once had an affair with his cousin (who was adopted). The cousin is a nice enough but slightly troubled woman who goes out of her way to be friendly - with Amina, not George. He does not stray during the wedding, he isn't even excessively affectionate towards the woman, but Amina punishes him anyway. Laughably, she moralizes that her husband is someone who thinks that a lie is a lie only when spoken out loud. Yet, when Amina does far worse than her husband, she doesn't own up to it either - but her affair (adulterous, this one) that goes nowhere is poignant, not squalid like her husband damn it! I cannot even, the affair where a married Amina throws herself at Nasir, fails to feel any guilt, is disappointed because Nasir exercises more restraint than her is somehow more elevated than her husband's past affair with his cousin when he was unattached.
With the affair comes the next problem. We spend 300 of a 330 pages book reading as Amina says again and again how her teenage crush for Nasir had fled out of the window. Her considerations are calculating - Nasir has an unmarried sister who's ready to play mother-in-law to anyone Nasir marries. Yet, the moment she sees Nasir again, she LOVES him - don't try to argue! Did his sister vanish into thin air? And what were her parents thinking? Why go stay at a single man's house with your daughter who was supposed to marry him at one time? Which sane parent would do that? Aargh - the more I think, the more problems I have with this tripe - and it's really not worth the time I'm putting into it.
Bye bye Nell Freudenberger.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
September 23, 2012
At first I was captivated by this story ; a woman from Bangladesh marrying an American ,meeting him thru e-mail,wishing to go to America and her explanations and expectation of a new life in a new place. It seemed very interesting his journey to to meet her,her family and their subsequent life together. The portrait of Amina 's husband David emerges slowly and gracefully and we come to know him as a decent and thoughtful man. BUT alas and alack .. there is something BAD he did, (spoiler alert!) and to my way of thinking Amina reacts childishly and stupidly. After three years of marriage, and with no baby, She returns to Bangladesh to bring her parents to the U.S.A. Her journey home takes up the last third of the book. It is tedious, boring,predictable and flat. I had a hard time finishing it. I wouldn't recommend this book at all.
May 30, 2012
I'm giving this one 4 stars, but I'm still debating over 3 stars. I'm conflicted in the way the novel itself seems conflicted. When I finished, I wasn't sure what point, if any, Freudenberger wanted to make. Of course, life itself is a series of complex situations in which one often doesn't know that is the best/right thing to do, and the novel captures that confusion very well. Marriage is tough enough when the partners have grown up in the same culture. Amina comes to Rochester from Bangladesh to find a new life, and her new life is not a fairy tale. When she learns that her husband has had an affair with his (adopted) cousin, a woman Amina has come to like as perhaps her only friend in this country, well, life is complicated. Other reviewers had described the unreality of Amina's relationship with George; maybe such is true for most relationships! The subplot of the misadventures of Amina's parents as they deal with life in Bangladesh while attempting to prepare to come to the USA, well, again, the authors pushes the boundaries of believability, I think. As you can tell, I confused about my response to the novel, but I did find it interesting to read and to consider after completing it. Please let me know what you think when/if you read this one.
March 26, 2012
When I pick up a book entitled The Newlyweds, I expect it to be…well, about newlyweds: in this case, Amina Mazid, who moves from Bangladesh to Rochester, New York to marry a man she meets online – George Stillman.
And, since the cultures are so vastly different, I expect something else: a “ring” of authenticity, similar to the stories that Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie or Jhumpa Lahiri explore so convincingly in their works. I expect a work that’s rich in character and brimming with the realities of a woman who leaves her native land at the height of the 9/11 terror and who strives to bridge her own cultural adherences and biases to her new husband and her new land.
Yet that isn’t quite what I got. I understand the theme of this novel, which is outlined here: “Was there a person who existed between languages? …She had thought that she’d been born with a soul whose thoughts were in a particular dialect, and she’d imagined that, when she married, her husband would be able to recognize this deep part of herself…In a way, George had created her American self, and so it made sense that it was the only one he would see.”
But as I read this book, though, I couldn’t help but think that it wasn’t George who created Amina’s American self…it was the author herself. I couldn’t shake the feeling that Amina was, at her core, American. I didn’t quite believe that a Muslim woman with little experience would quickly sleep with her fiancé, disregard her mother’s teachings, and not honor her parent’s wishes about an Islam wedding. I didn’t believe that George’s traditional family would so quickly embrace a “foreign” woman into their fold. But most of all, I didn’t believe in the relationship between Amina and George. Although explanations are given, it was hard to fathom how this 34-year-old man decided to marry – sight nearly unseen – a woman from another culture because she “didn’t play games.” George’s character is just never sufficiently fleshed out.
There are some big pluses about this book. The prose is confident and seamless; Ms. Freudenberger knows how to tell a story and to hold suspense. The story of how two virtual strangers hide a big part of themselves from the other is quite enticing. The quintessential journey homeward – when Amina must determine if there’s a distinction between the Bangladeshi Amina and the American one and confront her left-behind self – is nicely realized.
In one knowing sentence, Amina says to George, “At first we were puzzle pieces. Now we’re the puzzle.” Surrounded by somewhat stereotypical supporting players (her cousin who has a religious awakening, his free-living cousin who spurts anything on her mind and is a yoga instructor), both characters remain puzzle pieces because they never become two independent pieces of a whole. With Ms. Freudenberger’s obvious skill, that is, indeed, puzzling.
And, since the cultures are so vastly different, I expect something else: a “ring” of authenticity, similar to the stories that Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie or Jhumpa Lahiri explore so convincingly in their works. I expect a work that’s rich in character and brimming with the realities of a woman who leaves her native land at the height of the 9/11 terror and who strives to bridge her own cultural adherences and biases to her new husband and her new land.
Yet that isn’t quite what I got. I understand the theme of this novel, which is outlined here: “Was there a person who existed between languages? …She had thought that she’d been born with a soul whose thoughts were in a particular dialect, and she’d imagined that, when she married, her husband would be able to recognize this deep part of herself…In a way, George had created her American self, and so it made sense that it was the only one he would see.”
But as I read this book, though, I couldn’t help but think that it wasn’t George who created Amina’s American self…it was the author herself. I couldn’t shake the feeling that Amina was, at her core, American. I didn’t quite believe that a Muslim woman with little experience would quickly sleep with her fiancé, disregard her mother’s teachings, and not honor her parent’s wishes about an Islam wedding. I didn’t believe that George’s traditional family would so quickly embrace a “foreign” woman into their fold. But most of all, I didn’t believe in the relationship between Amina and George. Although explanations are given, it was hard to fathom how this 34-year-old man decided to marry – sight nearly unseen – a woman from another culture because she “didn’t play games.” George’s character is just never sufficiently fleshed out.
There are some big pluses about this book. The prose is confident and seamless; Ms. Freudenberger knows how to tell a story and to hold suspense. The story of how two virtual strangers hide a big part of themselves from the other is quite enticing. The quintessential journey homeward – when Amina must determine if there’s a distinction between the Bangladeshi Amina and the American one and confront her left-behind self – is nicely realized.
In one knowing sentence, Amina says to George, “At first we were puzzle pieces. Now we’re the puzzle.” Surrounded by somewhat stereotypical supporting players (her cousin who has a religious awakening, his free-living cousin who spurts anything on her mind and is a yoga instructor), both characters remain puzzle pieces because they never become two independent pieces of a whole. With Ms. Freudenberger’s obvious skill, that is, indeed, puzzling.
August 20, 2018
I picked up this book because of a review I read somewhere that compared Freudenberger to Jhumpa Lahiri; I suppose with expectations that high, I should have expected to be let down, which I definitely was to the nth degree. This book started out with so much potential, but about a quarter of the way through, it became almost unbearable.
The author has a pleasant, almost soothing tone that I enjoyed, but her plot and characterizations are a bit of a mess. The secondary characters were actually fairly well fleshed out, realistic, believable and sympathetic. Something however, went sorely amiss with the main character Amina, around whom the novel revolves. She is clearly flawed, but not in a sympathetic or relatable way that is necessary for a properly constructed central character. For every mistake she made, my connection to her weakened while my connection to the other characters increased. I felt myself judging her severely and unable to muster even the slightest bit of empathy for her character. Somehow, I don’t think this is what Freudenbeger was going for. Surprisingly, it was Kim, Amina’s unstable, hippy cousin-in-law and eventually even boring middle-class husband George who I found myself most interested in and empathizing with the most.
Plotwise, there was almost too much going on. The books reads like a Lahiri book at first, with simple, fluid language that led me to believe the story and characters would steal into my heart just from there everyday thoughts and actions. Unfortunately, Freudenberger seems to feel the need to throw in random and very unpredictable plot twists repeatedly throughout the book, to the point where I really didn’t feel any of the event were especially believable and it soured my opinion of the entire situation and the characters involved int he situations. This is a pleasant read to start, but by the second half of the book, I found myself quite irritated with Amina in particular and wishing the book would draw to an end. There was little redemption by the end of the book – Amina’s sense of entitlement compounded with with her generally annoying, nosey, self-absorbed character tarnishes the fluidity of the prose and puts a damper on what otherwise might have been a pleasant, if not especially thought provoking read.
The author has a pleasant, almost soothing tone that I enjoyed, but her plot and characterizations are a bit of a mess. The secondary characters were actually fairly well fleshed out, realistic, believable and sympathetic. Something however, went sorely amiss with the main character Amina, around whom the novel revolves. She is clearly flawed, but not in a sympathetic or relatable way that is necessary for a properly constructed central character. For every mistake she made, my connection to her weakened while my connection to the other characters increased. I felt myself judging her severely and unable to muster even the slightest bit of empathy for her character. Somehow, I don’t think this is what Freudenbeger was going for. Surprisingly, it was Kim, Amina’s unstable, hippy cousin-in-law and eventually even boring middle-class husband George who I found myself most interested in and empathizing with the most.
Plotwise, there was almost too much going on. The books reads like a Lahiri book at first, with simple, fluid language that led me to believe the story and characters would steal into my heart just from there everyday thoughts and actions. Unfortunately, Freudenberger seems to feel the need to throw in random and very unpredictable plot twists repeatedly throughout the book, to the point where I really didn’t feel any of the event were especially believable and it soured my opinion of the entire situation and the characters involved int he situations. This is a pleasant read to start, but by the second half of the book, I found myself quite irritated with Amina in particular and wishing the book would draw to an end. There was little redemption by the end of the book – Amina’s sense of entitlement compounded with with her generally annoying, nosey, self-absorbed character tarnishes the fluidity of the prose and puts a damper on what otherwise might have been a pleasant, if not especially thought provoking read.
September 25, 2019
So-so story about young woman from Bangladesh, marrying an American that she met online. What I found interesting was the description of life in the Middle East, Southern Asia, and Bangladesh in particular. The customs, life-style, institutions, etc. Very enlightening.
May 24, 2012
The Newlyweds
By
Nell Freudenberger
In a nutshell...
George and Amina meet through an online dating service. George is a rather stiff American. Amina comes from Bangladesh. They meet. They marry. Confusion reigns.
My thoughts after reading...
I felt immersed in George and Amina's issues as I read this lovely book. The book is about how they came together and their efforts to stay together when Amina discovers that George has kept something from her. It is an insight into what it is like for someone from a totally different culture to come to grips with life in America. Amina's discoveries and trials are sweet and funny. I loved her relationship with her parents as she tries to earn money and get George to understand that her parents will eventually come to live with them. She does not want children until her mother is there to help her raise them. Amina is sweet, funny, likable and naive. She tries to make everyone happy. George is sort of dry and does not seem to have a sense of humor. I have a mental picture of Amina being petite and pretty while George is pale and rather dull. I had doubts about their relationship from the beginning...it seemed sort of sparkless and odd.
What I loved about this book...
Oh my gosh...I loved Amina and her parents...her father seemed like an aging juvenile delinquent. He was forever scheming get rich plans and his life and finances were always on the edge of disaster...thus making life difficult for Amina and her mom. I loved reading about the "Desh" traditions...bathing in a pond, scrubbing with clay, living in one room or with relatives. I loved getting to know the many and varied family members and all of their opinions about everything! This includes George's family, too.
What I did not love...
Not a huge fan of George...he seemed too dispassionate. I hated his secrets from Amina.
He just seemed so dull! Not a huge fan of his cousin, either...she was too dishonest and weird!
Final thoughts about this book...
This book was a total lovely surprise for me...loved the writing, loved the clash of cultures,
loved the gentle humor. Loved the ending. Loved Amina's strength, humor, and growth. Loved pretty much the entire tidy fun little book package called The Newlyweds!
By
Nell Freudenberger
In a nutshell...
George and Amina meet through an online dating service. George is a rather stiff American. Amina comes from Bangladesh. They meet. They marry. Confusion reigns.
My thoughts after reading...
I felt immersed in George and Amina's issues as I read this lovely book. The book is about how they came together and their efforts to stay together when Amina discovers that George has kept something from her. It is an insight into what it is like for someone from a totally different culture to come to grips with life in America. Amina's discoveries and trials are sweet and funny. I loved her relationship with her parents as she tries to earn money and get George to understand that her parents will eventually come to live with them. She does not want children until her mother is there to help her raise them. Amina is sweet, funny, likable and naive. She tries to make everyone happy. George is sort of dry and does not seem to have a sense of humor. I have a mental picture of Amina being petite and pretty while George is pale and rather dull. I had doubts about their relationship from the beginning...it seemed sort of sparkless and odd.
What I loved about this book...
Oh my gosh...I loved Amina and her parents...her father seemed like an aging juvenile delinquent. He was forever scheming get rich plans and his life and finances were always on the edge of disaster...thus making life difficult for Amina and her mom. I loved reading about the "Desh" traditions...bathing in a pond, scrubbing with clay, living in one room or with relatives. I loved getting to know the many and varied family members and all of their opinions about everything! This includes George's family, too.
What I did not love...
Not a huge fan of George...he seemed too dispassionate. I hated his secrets from Amina.
He just seemed so dull! Not a huge fan of his cousin, either...she was too dishonest and weird!
Final thoughts about this book...
This book was a total lovely surprise for me...loved the writing, loved the clash of cultures,
loved the gentle humor. Loved the ending. Loved Amina's strength, humor, and growth. Loved pretty much the entire tidy fun little book package called The Newlyweds!
March 26, 2016
3 stars - It was good.
Favorite Quote: It seemed incredible that it could be the same road, the same asphalt, that they had traveled so many times together. You thought that you were the permanent part of your own experience, the net that held it all together—until you discovered that there were many selves, dissolving into one another so quickly over time that the buildings and the trees and even the pavement turned out to have more substance than you did.
First Sentence: She hadn’t heard the mailman, but Amina decided to go out and check.
Favorite Quote: It seemed incredible that it could be the same road, the same asphalt, that they had traveled so many times together. You thought that you were the permanent part of your own experience, the net that held it all together—until you discovered that there were many selves, dissolving into one another so quickly over time that the buildings and the trees and even the pavement turned out to have more substance than you did.
First Sentence: She hadn’t heard the mailman, but Amina decided to go out and check.
June 20, 2012
Underwhelmed.
The premise set me up to be disappointed because I presumed since both individuals had secret motives and unresolved feelings about prior romantic possibilities that I would get to hear both sides of the story. I didn't.
Instead, I got Amina calculating, Amina hesitating, Amina scheming, Amina presuming, Amina leveraging, Amina wavering, Amina straying, and Amina ultimately getting her way far more often than I felt she deserved to.
And George was so narrowly characterized through her point of view - he was a safe passport to the American future she felt entitled to, and once he yielded to her insistence that her parents emigrate as well, it didn't matter that he was less sturdy than ever before. I wished she had been forced to consider if he was still her choice if he lost the house and the ability to offer safe harbor to her parents.
I guess it accurately depicts the complexity behind the many variables in how one chooses a mate - across cultures as well - but I felt so little for Amina and George that their knotty love story didn't leave much of a lasting impression on me at all.
The premise set me up to be disappointed because I presumed since both individuals had secret motives and unresolved feelings about prior romantic possibilities that I would get to hear both sides of the story. I didn't.
Instead, I got Amina calculating, Amina hesitating, Amina scheming, Amina presuming, Amina leveraging, Amina wavering, Amina straying, and Amina ultimately getting her way far more often than I felt she deserved to.
And George was so narrowly characterized through her point of view - he was a safe passport to the American future she felt entitled to, and once he yielded to her insistence that her parents emigrate as well, it didn't matter that he was less sturdy than ever before. I wished she had been forced to consider if he was still her choice if he lost the house and the ability to offer safe harbor to her parents.
I guess it accurately depicts the complexity behind the many variables in how one chooses a mate - across cultures as well - but I felt so little for Amina and George that their knotty love story didn't leave much of a lasting impression on me at all.
September 22, 2012
I have to be honest, I was completely underwhelmed by this book. There was so much build-up around it, but for me the story just didn't deliver. First off, the title seemed misleading, as it wasn't so much the story of a marriage or a relationship, but Amina's immigration story. At times I felt like I was reading an Anne Tyler novel with the usual quirky characters, but unlike Tyler, this author didn't make me fall in love with her protagonists. George was one dimensional, a stolid, secretive man whom we never really get to know at all. He came across more as a prop for Amina's story than a player in his own right. I found myself wondering what he was really like. Did he eat curry before Amina entered his life? Both Amina and her husband came of as stereotypical stick figures who immediately fell into gender and race specific roles without questioning their validity. I can't fault the writing, it is clear and evocative, it was what kept me hanging in there to the end.
May 9, 2019
3.5 stars. For most of the book it is nearly a 4. But the length and the last quarter, somehow it lost an entire star within the embedding, so I can't round it up from 3. For me, it would have been a much better book without so much of the myriads of characters' introductions and interactions within that last "home" trip to bring her parents back to the USA as new immigrants.
It's far more an immigrant story than a newly married one, IMHO. And to tell you the honest truth, by the ending I felt far more empathy for George than I did for our protagonist, Amina. Truly, I felt her core was quite cold. And also considerably calculating. Rather a perfect candidate for an arranged marriage, as well.
Freudenberger is an excellent writer. But she could have done as much cultural clash feel and intersect with that village/ family politics in Bangladesh pecking orders and status quo obligations and "eyes" of emotion without the circumvent verbose tangents that made up at least a 1/3rd of the length all told. Immigrating legally is hard. Almost always, and I know it.
There is something about the ending that turned me off. Especially upon that contest outcome. Kim intrusion again, of course. She was so off putting in lengthy confessionals . It tired me so much that I considered a DNF when she became the central self-appointed diva during considerable percentages of the middle of this book. Nasir made up for her. Conflicted and "good intent" character that we all need daily. This author gets better with practice. You can tell this was her beginning stage with The Newlyweds.
It's far more an immigrant story than a newly married one, IMHO. And to tell you the honest truth, by the ending I felt far more empathy for George than I did for our protagonist, Amina. Truly, I felt her core was quite cold. And also considerably calculating. Rather a perfect candidate for an arranged marriage, as well.
Freudenberger is an excellent writer. But she could have done as much cultural clash feel and intersect with that village/ family politics in Bangladesh pecking orders and status quo obligations and "eyes" of emotion without the circumvent verbose tangents that made up at least a 1/3rd of the length all told. Immigrating legally is hard. Almost always, and I know it.
There is something about the ending that turned me off. Especially upon that contest outcome. Kim intrusion again, of course. She was so off putting in lengthy confessionals . It tired me so much that I considered a DNF when she became the central self-appointed diva during considerable percentages of the middle of this book. Nasir made up for her. Conflicted and "good intent" character that we all need daily. This author gets better with practice. You can tell this was her beginning stage with The Newlyweds.
October 7, 2012
This story kind of sneaks up on you. It felt like a quiet and pleasant three-star read most of the way through, with occasional four star moments. Then I finally closed it and thought, you know, that was really better than I realized at the time. But ultimately I think I'll go with three stars because I don't want to oversell the experience of reading it.
Amina, a Bangladeshi 20-something woman, marries George, an American engineer living in Rochester whom she has met online. She moves to Rochester to be with him, assuming that she'll soon be able to bring her parents over to live with them. As her relationship with George progresses, though, she gets some unwanted surprises, not the least of which is that an American man like George may not take it as a given that his in-laws will be moving in long-term. There were some surprises about George's romantic past as well, to which Amina's reaction seemed a bit over the top to me and difficult to fully empathize with.
This book was certainly readable, with fully realized characters and cultural differences that felt authentic. Though slow at times, it never got so boring I felt the need to put it down. At the same time, it did go on a bit too long and though I ended up liking it quite a bit, it was basically a three star read.
Amina, a Bangladeshi 20-something woman, marries George, an American engineer living in Rochester whom she has met online. She moves to Rochester to be with him, assuming that she'll soon be able to bring her parents over to live with them. As her relationship with George progresses, though, she gets some unwanted surprises, not the least of which is that an American man like George may not take it as a given that his in-laws will be moving in long-term. There were some surprises about George's romantic past as well, to which Amina's reaction seemed a bit over the top to me and difficult to fully empathize with.
This book was certainly readable, with fully realized characters and cultural differences that felt authentic. Though slow at times, it never got so boring I felt the need to put it down. At the same time, it did go on a bit too long and though I ended up liking it quite a bit, it was basically a three star read.
June 10, 2012
Nell Freudenberger has populated The Newlyweds with characters so real and alive it felt as if I were reading non-fiction. Amina has escaped the poverty and difficulties of her life in Bangladesh as a modern day "mail-order" bride. She is adjusting to her new life in Rochester, NY with her husband George whom she met on an international dating site. Amina struggles with differences in culture and climate and spends her time working towards the goals of bringing her parents to the U.S., a college degree, and having a baby. Of course life has a way of taking unexpected turns and Amina learns that no matter how carefully she plans and thinks things through everything is fluid and can change unexpectedly- even herself.
I loved the vivid descriptions of Amina's life in NY & especially in Bangladesh. Her parents are very flawed but loveable characters. Many times throughout the book I would've liked to give them a hug :) At turns exciting, contemplative, humorous, and heartbreaking this novel contains the full range of human emotion and experience. I would love if there were a sequel to the Newlyweds so I could find out what happens next to these compelling characters!
I loved the vivid descriptions of Amina's life in NY & especially in Bangladesh. Her parents are very flawed but loveable characters. Many times throughout the book I would've liked to give them a hug :) At turns exciting, contemplative, humorous, and heartbreaking this novel contains the full range of human emotion and experience. I would love if there were a sequel to the Newlyweds so I could find out what happens next to these compelling characters!
February 7, 2019
A brilliant story which stuck with me long after I finished it.
My Rating: 5 stars
My Rating: 5 stars
November 23, 2013
Eventually, Nell Freudenberger will have written so many wonderful books that we’ll stop gossiping about how success fell into the young woman’s lap at age 26.
The tale of her sudden fame is the stuff of writers’ fantasies — a nerdy version of Lana Turner being discovered on a soda fountain stool. In 2001, while working as an editorial assistant at the New Yorker, Freudenberger had her first story published in the magazine, along with an alluring photo of herself lounging on a purple blanket. Vogue and Elle swooned. (A lot of us did.) A bidding war broke out over her first — at the time, unwritten — book. Prizes and fellowships followed. Granta named her one of the Best Young American Novelists. “Hating Nell Freudenberger,” Curtis Sittenfeld wrote in Salon, “is a virtual cottage industry among ambitious literati.”
Her new book should ramp up that cottage industry to major envy manufacturing. “The Newlyweds” is a delight, one of the easiest book recommendations of the year. (An excerpt appeared in the New Yorker’s “20 Under 40” series in 2010.) The cross-cultural tensions and romance so well drawn here recall the pleasures of Monica Ali’s “Brick Lane” and Helen Simonson’s “Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand.” On a recent trip to St. Louis, I read most of it out loud to my wife, and we both fell in love with Freudenberg’s Bangladeshi heroine.
As the story begins, Amina Mazid is living in Rochester, N.Y. It’s been six months since she left her parents back in Dhaka. Her new husband, George, is “a thirty-four-year old SWM who was looking for a wife” on AsianEuro.com. Because “he was a romantic,” they corresponded for almost a year before she flew to the United States. Now she’s sitting in her impossibly comfortable American house, trying to learn everything she can about her new country. “She was lucky,” Freudenberger writes, “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.” But as difficult as our colloquial phrases are, Amina finds American sarcasm and passive aggression even more mysterious: “Quarrels at home were explosive, public, and necessarily brief,” she notes. “In Rochester, Amina thought it might be possible to stay angry for a lifetime.”
Freudenberger’s story collection, “Lucky Girls,” and her first novel, “The Dissident,” displayed her sensitivity to the anxious interaction between Americans and people from other countries, and in this new novel she articulates that apprehension with winning comedy and poignancy. She’s that rare artist who speaks fluently from many different cultural perspectives, without preciousness or undue caution. Informed by her travels in Thailand, India and China, she understands the complicated negotiations that always attend contacts between people of radically different backgrounds, no matter how accommodating they claim to be.
Page by page, “The Newlyweds” explores the tangled misimpressions and deceptions that separate Amina and George — and sometimes bind them together. An electrical engineer with a penchant for useful factoids, George can sound bossy and condescending, and, let’s face it, there’s something suspicious about shopping for an attractive woman in a poor country. But Amina is far from a helpless mail-order bride lost in a strange land. The more we get to know her, the more we realize just how deliberately she’s carrying out a long and complicated plan that George — “just a piece of the puzzle” — barely comprehends. “She was not a little girl playing a game,” Freudenberger writes. “She was a twenty-four-year-old woman whose family’s future depended on this decision.”
Freudenberger knows Amina as well as Jane Austen knows Emma, and despite its globe-spanning set changes, “The Newlyweds” offers a reading experience redolent of Janeite charms: gentle touches of social satire, subtly drawn characters and dialogue that expresses far more than its polite surface. And how Freudenberger keeps the chapters moving is a mystery of perpetual motion: Waiting for a visa, waiting for a green card, waiting for a job, waiting for a citizenship test — these bureaucratic delays should be no more entertaining than standing in line, but in this lucidly plotted novel, they seem like high drama.
That success rests largely on the portrayal of Amina, a young woman who can’t shake the sense that she looks wrong. If only she could “dismiss her Deshi self entirely, ask it to wait in the hall,” she thinks. “It was possible to change your own destiny, but you had to be vigilant and you could never look back.” No one as dedicated to her parents as Amina is, though, could fail to look back. Indeed, much of the appeal of “The Newlyweds” is the way she and George negotiate the demands of their respective families with a mixture of affection and exasperation. Moving gracefully between the sterile suburbs of Rochester and the aromatic markets of Dhaka, the novel locates that unsettling inflection point when we shift from being cared for by our parents to caring for them, without ever losing the need to please them, to win their approval, to make them happy.
Suspended between two cultures, two homes 8,000 miles apart, Amina wonders if there’s an essential identity that exists “beneath languages.” She can’t escape her suspicion that the price of assimilation is too high — not just the loss of her Islamic faith and her friends and her food, but the abandonment of any sense of personal solidity. “You thought that you were the permanent part of your own experience, the net that held it all together,” she thinks, “until you discovered that there were many selves, dissolving into one another so quickly over time that the buildings and the trees and even the pavement turned out to have more substance than you did.”
As you can tell, “The Newlyweds” is ultimately less romantic than its title. George and Amina soon realize, as any couple must, that they don’t know as much about each other as they once believed. After all, an online algorithm is so primitive compared with the intimate knowledge a village matchmaker can offer a young couple in the villages of Bangladesh. On either side of the world, making a marriage work demands casting off not just old lovers but cherished fantasies about who we are. Whether these two alien lovebirds can — or should — do that is the question Freudenberger poses so beguilingly.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/enterta...
The tale of her sudden fame is the stuff of writers’ fantasies — a nerdy version of Lana Turner being discovered on a soda fountain stool. In 2001, while working as an editorial assistant at the New Yorker, Freudenberger had her first story published in the magazine, along with an alluring photo of herself lounging on a purple blanket. Vogue and Elle swooned. (A lot of us did.) A bidding war broke out over her first — at the time, unwritten — book. Prizes and fellowships followed. Granta named her one of the Best Young American Novelists. “Hating Nell Freudenberger,” Curtis Sittenfeld wrote in Salon, “is a virtual cottage industry among ambitious literati.”
Her new book should ramp up that cottage industry to major envy manufacturing. “The Newlyweds” is a delight, one of the easiest book recommendations of the year. (An excerpt appeared in the New Yorker’s “20 Under 40” series in 2010.) The cross-cultural tensions and romance so well drawn here recall the pleasures of Monica Ali’s “Brick Lane” and Helen Simonson’s “Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand.” On a recent trip to St. Louis, I read most of it out loud to my wife, and we both fell in love with Freudenberg’s Bangladeshi heroine.
As the story begins, Amina Mazid is living in Rochester, N.Y. It’s been six months since she left her parents back in Dhaka. Her new husband, George, is “a thirty-four-year old SWM who was looking for a wife” on AsianEuro.com. Because “he was a romantic,” they corresponded for almost a year before she flew to the United States. Now she’s sitting in her impossibly comfortable American house, trying to learn everything she can about her new country. “She was lucky,” Freudenberger writes, “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.” But as difficult as our colloquial phrases are, Amina finds American sarcasm and passive aggression even more mysterious: “Quarrels at home were explosive, public, and necessarily brief,” she notes. “In Rochester, Amina thought it might be possible to stay angry for a lifetime.”
Freudenberger’s story collection, “Lucky Girls,” and her first novel, “The Dissident,” displayed her sensitivity to the anxious interaction between Americans and people from other countries, and in this new novel she articulates that apprehension with winning comedy and poignancy. She’s that rare artist who speaks fluently from many different cultural perspectives, without preciousness or undue caution. Informed by her travels in Thailand, India and China, she understands the complicated negotiations that always attend contacts between people of radically different backgrounds, no matter how accommodating they claim to be.
Page by page, “The Newlyweds” explores the tangled misimpressions and deceptions that separate Amina and George — and sometimes bind them together. An electrical engineer with a penchant for useful factoids, George can sound bossy and condescending, and, let’s face it, there’s something suspicious about shopping for an attractive woman in a poor country. But Amina is far from a helpless mail-order bride lost in a strange land. The more we get to know her, the more we realize just how deliberately she’s carrying out a long and complicated plan that George — “just a piece of the puzzle” — barely comprehends. “She was not a little girl playing a game,” Freudenberger writes. “She was a twenty-four-year-old woman whose family’s future depended on this decision.”
Freudenberger knows Amina as well as Jane Austen knows Emma, and despite its globe-spanning set changes, “The Newlyweds” offers a reading experience redolent of Janeite charms: gentle touches of social satire, subtly drawn characters and dialogue that expresses far more than its polite surface. And how Freudenberger keeps the chapters moving is a mystery of perpetual motion: Waiting for a visa, waiting for a green card, waiting for a job, waiting for a citizenship test — these bureaucratic delays should be no more entertaining than standing in line, but in this lucidly plotted novel, they seem like high drama.
That success rests largely on the portrayal of Amina, a young woman who can’t shake the sense that she looks wrong. If only she could “dismiss her Deshi self entirely, ask it to wait in the hall,” she thinks. “It was possible to change your own destiny, but you had to be vigilant and you could never look back.” No one as dedicated to her parents as Amina is, though, could fail to look back. Indeed, much of the appeal of “The Newlyweds” is the way she and George negotiate the demands of their respective families with a mixture of affection and exasperation. Moving gracefully between the sterile suburbs of Rochester and the aromatic markets of Dhaka, the novel locates that unsettling inflection point when we shift from being cared for by our parents to caring for them, without ever losing the need to please them, to win their approval, to make them happy.
Suspended between two cultures, two homes 8,000 miles apart, Amina wonders if there’s an essential identity that exists “beneath languages.” She can’t escape her suspicion that the price of assimilation is too high — not just the loss of her Islamic faith and her friends and her food, but the abandonment of any sense of personal solidity. “You thought that you were the permanent part of your own experience, the net that held it all together,” she thinks, “until you discovered that there were many selves, dissolving into one another so quickly over time that the buildings and the trees and even the pavement turned out to have more substance than you did.”
As you can tell, “The Newlyweds” is ultimately less romantic than its title. George and Amina soon realize, as any couple must, that they don’t know as much about each other as they once believed. After all, an online algorithm is so primitive compared with the intimate knowledge a village matchmaker can offer a young couple in the villages of Bangladesh. On either side of the world, making a marriage work demands casting off not just old lovers but cherished fantasies about who we are. Whether these two alien lovebirds can — or should — do that is the question Freudenberger poses so beguilingly.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/enterta...
May 13, 2012
After gushing on about so many really good novels I have read this year, it is almost a relief to come across one that does not quite bowl you over and that you can formulate some criticisms. Though this is not to say all is wrong with Nell Freudenberger's The Newlyweds or that the novel did not have potential in this story of Amina, a young Bangladeshi modern-day mail-order bride (aka international Internet "dating" site) bride coming to Rochester, NY to start a life in surburbia with George, an electrical engineer.
The first parts worked out quite well, exploring the cultural mine-field that would be at the very core of this kind of relationship, let alone any new marriage. Amina is smart and charming, George a bit tentative and bumbling and it was interesting to see how things falling out. But then things get a big bogged up as the emphasis shifts from the marriage to Amina's obsession with bringing her parents to the States. Without giving too much away and despite a good twist with each of the newlyweds (which came the proverbial "day late, dollar short"), I found the novel lost its focus and, by the end, I got thinking "The Newlywed" or "Getting A Visa" would have been a more apt title.
A bit more nagging, was that I did not find the work to have an authentic ethnic voice. In the acknowledgements, Freudenberger suggests the jumping point of the novel was a couple she knew and also notes her own extensive international travel. But I just don't think that kind of observational research, especially as an outsider, can possibly create what would have been a far richer literary experience if the author was Bangladeshi.
Good. In parts, interesting. But ultimately, just a bit of timing misfortune of not favorably stacking up against recent reads. 2.5 stars, with the round-down to an "okay" 2 stars.
The first parts worked out quite well, exploring the cultural mine-field that would be at the very core of this kind of relationship, let alone any new marriage. Amina is smart and charming, George a bit tentative and bumbling and it was interesting to see how things falling out. But then things get a big bogged up as the emphasis shifts from the marriage to Amina's obsession with bringing her parents to the States. Without giving too much away and despite a good twist with each of the newlyweds (which came the proverbial "day late, dollar short"), I found the novel lost its focus and, by the end, I got thinking "The Newlywed" or "Getting A Visa" would have been a more apt title.
A bit more nagging, was that I did not find the work to have an authentic ethnic voice. In the acknowledgements, Freudenberger suggests the jumping point of the novel was a couple she knew and also notes her own extensive international travel. But I just don't think that kind of observational research, especially as an outsider, can possibly create what would have been a far richer literary experience if the author was Bangladeshi.
Good. In parts, interesting. But ultimately, just a bit of timing misfortune of not favorably stacking up against recent reads. 2.5 stars, with the round-down to an "okay" 2 stars.
November 16, 2012
I most recently finished Nell Freudenberger's The Newlyweds. Another much-lauded recent hardcover. From Bangladesh, Amina and her doting, complicated parents pin their hopes for their future on the marriage she has arranged with George in Rochester, who she meets on an online dating site geared towards east Asians and their North American suitors. This is a sweet, quiet little story about two people moving across nations to be together and carrying with them the baggage, desires, and secrets of two people moving across the world to be together. The title is so deliciously deliberate. Who are we when we choose to marry another? Is the leap of faith between two high school sweethearts really any different than an online marriage between a Deshi Muslim woman and her engineer husband-to-be? The writing is top notch - it is evocative without being showy, plain and still but revealing and imminently readable. I loved the tone that Freudenberger struck and her astute eye for the details - both in Rochester (and how thrilling it was to hear reference to places in the Rochester area that I knew and had even stepped foot in!) and in Bangladesh. At it's heart, this is a love story, though an unexpected one. It's also about faith and hope and the disconnection between the developed and developing worlds, who are at once so very far apart and not so different after all. I quite liked this novel and would recommend it.
September 18, 2012
Let me just say right at the start that I read this less than impressive novel for a reading group. I have many highly anticipated novels on my TBR list and would much rather have been reading Michael Chabon (Telegraph Avenue), Zadie Smith (NW) or Susan Straight (Between Heaven and Here).
I have not read Ms Freudenberger's earlier novel, The Dissidents. I have been aware of her status as a hot young author. She did not measure up for me to the young authors who have blown me away in my reading this year: Jennifer Egan, Emily St John Mandel, Hari Kunzru, Scarlett Thomas, and more.
Her purpose in writing about Amina, a young Bangladeshi woman who marries an American man she met on an internet dating site, is to show the stresses and confusions of living between two cultures. She does make those stresses and confusions clear but compared to Jhumpa Lahiri's The Namesake or Brick Lane by Monica Ali, The Newlyweds felt too light, too thin; the characters lacked depth; and the story was weak on tension and emotional heft.
Of course, these are merely my opinions. The reading group members all enjoyed the book and felt they had learned something. The Newlyweds is a nice, easy read for those who don't like to be challenged too much. I know that sounds so condescending but I can't help it.
June 16, 2012
Cultures clash gently but persistently in Freudenberger's second novel, in which American electrical engineer George marries Bangladeshi teacher Amina and brings her to live in Rochester, New York. Having conducted a mostly online romance that was largely practical on both sides, the two must now adjust their expectations to the reality in front of them. We experience the relationship through the eyes of Amina, who finds out a secret about George's romantic past even as she's grappling with her own attraction for a friend back home. Freudenberger has an incredibly sure authorial hand, creating characters who feel completely three-dimensional. Her evocation of Dhaka and rural Bangladesh is highly detailed and seems pitch-perfect; by contrast, she doesn't use the Rochester setting for much except to emphasize its blandness. The last third of the novel hinges on some plot points that seem a bit convoluted, but a poignant ending redeems everything. All in all a satisfying and enlightening read, though not in my top five of the last year.
March 19, 2012
Finished this book through a haze of nausea and other unpleasantries. This was an intensely quiet book, and sometimes I felt the author was so removed from her characters and story that she had no agenda whatsoever in writing it. Maybe after mulling it over for a few days I'll change my mind. But something tells me that if this were Freudenberger's first published work, she'd be slightly less the literary darling that she is today.
June 29, 2012
A good story about family and making love work.
April 28, 2021
Really enjoyed this book and this story. Strong sense of place in Bangladesh and Rochester. Excellent at showing the nuances and emotional tenor of relationships. The main characters are likeable and imperfect. This makes me want to read more by this author.
Not an “own voices” story.
Not an “own voices” story.
September 22, 2016
The Newlyweds by Nell Freudenberger is about George, a White man in Rochester and Amina, a Bangladeshi woman in Dhaka who meet and “arrange” their own marriage through the power of online dating. While I thought this was an original premise, I had reservations about The Newlyweds from the outset. I thought, “oh no, not another arranged marriage saga. And this one is not even written by a person of South Asian origin. So, how authentic can it be?”
I prepared myself for rampant exotification and sensationalizing, which by the way, some South Asian and South Asian American authors are guilty of too. I was slightly comforted by the fact that the book cover eschewed the now over-used images meant to evoke South Asian exoticism: woman in a sari, woman’s hands or feet covered in intricate henna tattoos, or woman bedecked in copious amounts of 24 karat jewelry.
In reading the book, I was impressed by some of the authentic details that Freudenberger captured in terms of typical family dialogue, colloquial terminology, and descriptions of regional foods and customs. They were accurate to the essence without being overly explanatory, which is not an easy thing to do particularly if you’re from outside of the culture you’re writing about.
Some people I’ve talked to about this book found the title characters, George, and Amina, to be “flat.” In my mind, they were not flat so much as they were “square-ish.” They are largely average people, except for their high level of education, who have decided to squash any romantic notions they have about love in favor of searching for love and security as a packaged deal. Interestingly enough, Amina’s parents ran away together to get married and although George’s father is not in the picture, it’s unlikely that his parents had an arranged marriage. I actually think one of the great aspects of the book is that as the story evolves we watch these “square-ish” people begin to round out as they realize the complexities and complications of their relationship. There’s an interesting constellation of characters but most of them end up being a bit one-dimensional, serving mostly to directly or indirectly inform us about Amina and George.
In general, The Newlyweds is quite an original twist on the South-Asian-comes-to-America epic narrative because of its premise, which forces characters on both sides of the ocean to stretch in unique ways to navigate their new terrain. I especially appreciate that this book focuses on Bangladesh rather than India. My father is originally from Bangladesh but immigrated to India, where he met my mother. Lately, I’ve been thinking about how my Bangladeshi heritage has ended up being overshadowed by my Indian heritage in my own family and I think this is also true in literature. But this is slowly changing with the emergence onto the global scene of writers of Bangladeshi origin, like Tahmima Anam, author of A Golden Age and Taslima Nasrin, the controversial author of Shame.
My major gripe with this book is one that I have with several books: it introduces way too many key developments in the final 30-40 pages. This is problematic especially if it isn’t in-line with the pacing of the rest of the book. It leaves the reader feeling incredulous, flabbergasted, and a bit betrayed. You want to say to the author, “here I was, following you on this journey faithfully and then you jerked me around at the end.” I’ve tried to console myself by saying that Bangladesh is a place of extremes and unexpected outcomes – it’s regularly besieged by natural disasters such as cyclones and floods but it’s also given the world the groundbreaking Grameen Bank – so, perhaps almost anything is possible there.
The most fascinating part of the book for me, was in the Acknowledgements, where Freudenberger reveals that this book was inspired by a Bangladeshi woman she sat next to on a plane and how this woman’s story opened up a new world to her. On the whole, I’m glad for their serendipitous meeting and the book that it spawned.
I prepared myself for rampant exotification and sensationalizing, which by the way, some South Asian and South Asian American authors are guilty of too. I was slightly comforted by the fact that the book cover eschewed the now over-used images meant to evoke South Asian exoticism: woman in a sari, woman’s hands or feet covered in intricate henna tattoos, or woman bedecked in copious amounts of 24 karat jewelry.
In reading the book, I was impressed by some of the authentic details that Freudenberger captured in terms of typical family dialogue, colloquial terminology, and descriptions of regional foods and customs. They were accurate to the essence without being overly explanatory, which is not an easy thing to do particularly if you’re from outside of the culture you’re writing about.
Some people I’ve talked to about this book found the title characters, George, and Amina, to be “flat.” In my mind, they were not flat so much as they were “square-ish.” They are largely average people, except for their high level of education, who have decided to squash any romantic notions they have about love in favor of searching for love and security as a packaged deal. Interestingly enough, Amina’s parents ran away together to get married and although George’s father is not in the picture, it’s unlikely that his parents had an arranged marriage. I actually think one of the great aspects of the book is that as the story evolves we watch these “square-ish” people begin to round out as they realize the complexities and complications of their relationship. There’s an interesting constellation of characters but most of them end up being a bit one-dimensional, serving mostly to directly or indirectly inform us about Amina and George.
In general, The Newlyweds is quite an original twist on the South-Asian-comes-to-America epic narrative because of its premise, which forces characters on both sides of the ocean to stretch in unique ways to navigate their new terrain. I especially appreciate that this book focuses on Bangladesh rather than India. My father is originally from Bangladesh but immigrated to India, where he met my mother. Lately, I’ve been thinking about how my Bangladeshi heritage has ended up being overshadowed by my Indian heritage in my own family and I think this is also true in literature. But this is slowly changing with the emergence onto the global scene of writers of Bangladeshi origin, like Tahmima Anam, author of A Golden Age and Taslima Nasrin, the controversial author of Shame.
My major gripe with this book is one that I have with several books: it introduces way too many key developments in the final 30-40 pages. This is problematic especially if it isn’t in-line with the pacing of the rest of the book. It leaves the reader feeling incredulous, flabbergasted, and a bit betrayed. You want to say to the author, “here I was, following you on this journey faithfully and then you jerked me around at the end.” I’ve tried to console myself by saying that Bangladesh is a place of extremes and unexpected outcomes – it’s regularly besieged by natural disasters such as cyclones and floods but it’s also given the world the groundbreaking Grameen Bank – so, perhaps almost anything is possible there.
The most fascinating part of the book for me, was in the Acknowledgements, where Freudenberger reveals that this book was inspired by a Bangladeshi woman she sat next to on a plane and how this woman’s story opened up a new world to her. On the whole, I’m glad for their serendipitous meeting and the book that it spawned.
February 8, 2017
"It was possible to change your own destiny, but you had to be vigilant and you could never look back."
In this novel, billed as an examination of the complexities of modern love and marriage, Amina Mazid, a Bangladeshi woman, moves to Rochester, NY to get married to George Stillman, the American businessman she met online. Adjusting to life in her new home (and country) acts as a catalyst for Amina to examine her life choices and the meaning of home.
The Newlyweds is a charming, breezy read that is more intelligent than it may appear to be on its surface. To call it a romantic comedy might sell a lot of copies, but it would do a disservice to what a clever, carefully constructed story it is. It's actually more in the vein of a traditional comedy of manners, just set in the modern era. I have heard Freudenberger's writing compared to Jane Austen's, and there's a bit of truth to it. Like Austen, Freudenberger is capable of embedding some pretty sharp social commentary into her story--so subtly that you almost miss it. Unlike Austen, however, she lacks both the wit and the endearing characters that have made novels like Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility perennial classics.
You see, I enjoyed The Newlyweds. I'd recommend it. I think that Freudenberger's assertion that the world is not nearly as globalized or sophisticated as we believe it to be is pretty bloody brilliant. But the details of the story are already fading from my memory. By the end of the year it's likely I'll have forgotten all about it. I can imagine myself flipping through some "Best of 2012" articles come December, spotting it, and thinking to myself "Oh right. That book!"
A little more wit would have gone a long way, but I think it really comes down to the characters. George's family is full of dull stock characters. George himself is a rather limited, officious prig (definitely no Mr. Darcy--an unfair comparison in the best of circumstances, but no less apt I think). Perhaps that's Freudenberger's commentary on what modern Americans are actually like (significantly, the member of George's family that has the most depth is the one that is fascinated with Amina's cultural background to the point of obsession), but this insight doesn't make the novel any more interesting. That Americans are self-involved and self-important isn't exactly a revelatory observation (that Amina and her family are just as self-involved makes a more poignant dig at the modern world, but this is one of those super-subtle inferences Freudenberger employs). Amina and her family are much more vibrant and colorful, but not particularly likable either.
The Newlyweds is very much about the modern state of marriage, but it would be inaccurate to call it a love story. Love has very little to do with the proceedings, in the end. In fact, it's actually pretty cynical about love, given that it doesn't factor into the story at all. There's a dash of passion, but even that is notably lacking between our main couple. George and Amina's union represents more of a marriage-of-convenience than anything else. It got him a chance at the family he so desired, and it got her to America.
Given all its flaws, I'd still recommend The Newlyweds (it would be particularly good as a summer read, I think). I'm still curious to check out Freudenberger's other books. But if I'm being completely honest, I'm disappointingly "meh" about the experience I had with this one.
Grade: B
In this novel, billed as an examination of the complexities of modern love and marriage, Amina Mazid, a Bangladeshi woman, moves to Rochester, NY to get married to George Stillman, the American businessman she met online. Adjusting to life in her new home (and country) acts as a catalyst for Amina to examine her life choices and the meaning of home.
The Newlyweds is a charming, breezy read that is more intelligent than it may appear to be on its surface. To call it a romantic comedy might sell a lot of copies, but it would do a disservice to what a clever, carefully constructed story it is. It's actually more in the vein of a traditional comedy of manners, just set in the modern era. I have heard Freudenberger's writing compared to Jane Austen's, and there's a bit of truth to it. Like Austen, Freudenberger is capable of embedding some pretty sharp social commentary into her story--so subtly that you almost miss it. Unlike Austen, however, she lacks both the wit and the endearing characters that have made novels like Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility perennial classics.
You see, I enjoyed The Newlyweds. I'd recommend it. I think that Freudenberger's assertion that the world is not nearly as globalized or sophisticated as we believe it to be is pretty bloody brilliant. But the details of the story are already fading from my memory. By the end of the year it's likely I'll have forgotten all about it. I can imagine myself flipping through some "Best of 2012" articles come December, spotting it, and thinking to myself "Oh right. That book!"
A little more wit would have gone a long way, but I think it really comes down to the characters. George's family is full of dull stock characters. George himself is a rather limited, officious prig (definitely no Mr. Darcy--an unfair comparison in the best of circumstances, but no less apt I think). Perhaps that's Freudenberger's commentary on what modern Americans are actually like (significantly, the member of George's family that has the most depth is the one that is fascinated with Amina's cultural background to the point of obsession), but this insight doesn't make the novel any more interesting. That Americans are self-involved and self-important isn't exactly a revelatory observation (that Amina and her family are just as self-involved makes a more poignant dig at the modern world, but this is one of those super-subtle inferences Freudenberger employs). Amina and her family are much more vibrant and colorful, but not particularly likable either.
The Newlyweds is very much about the modern state of marriage, but it would be inaccurate to call it a love story. Love has very little to do with the proceedings, in the end. In fact, it's actually pretty cynical about love, given that it doesn't factor into the story at all. There's a dash of passion, but even that is notably lacking between our main couple. George and Amina's union represents more of a marriage-of-convenience than anything else. It got him a chance at the family he so desired, and it got her to America.
Given all its flaws, I'd still recommend The Newlyweds (it would be particularly good as a summer read, I think). I'm still curious to check out Freudenberger's other books. But if I'm being completely honest, I'm disappointingly "meh" about the experience I had with this one.
Grade: B
April 27, 2013
In a very odd way, this book partly set in Bangladesh reminded me a lot of home. I wouldn't say it made me nostalgic, but it was interesting to think about family culture and other things that I found similar to my country. Some quotes that I could relate to:
"Amina knew she was a different person in Bangla than she was English; she noticed the change every time she switched languages on the phone. She was older in English, and also less fastidious; she was the parent to her parents. In Bangla, of course, they were still the parents, and she let them fuss over her, asking whether she was maintaining her weight, and if she'd been able to find her Horlicks in America.
Was there a person who existed beneath languages? That was the question. As a teenager, Amina had thought there was. She had believed that she'd been born with a soul whose thoughts were in no particular dialect, and she'd imagined that, when she married, her husband would be able to recognize this deep part of herself. She thought that this recognition was how she would recognize him. Of course she hadn't counted on her husband being a foreigner, a person who called her honey rather than Munni. In a way, George had created her American self, and so it made sense that it was the only one he would see." p. 105
"It seemed incredible that it could be the same road, the same asphalt, that they had traveled so many times together. You thought that you were the permanent part of your own experience, the net that held it all together -until you discovered that there were many selves, dissolving into one another so quickly over time that the buildings and the trees and even the pavement turned out to have more substance than you did." p. 207
"You were never alone in this country: there were so many warm bodies in such a small space that it was extremely unlikely to find a view without a human being in it." p. 242
"Now that he was here, it was enough. She thought that she'd like to prolong this moment before they'd spoken to each other, that if there were a way to live a whole lifetime in this proximity, without the complications of speech or action, that was how she could be happy. But he was walking toward her, ruining it, and she spoke from a nervous compulsion." p. 278
"Amina knew she was a different person in Bangla than she was English; she noticed the change every time she switched languages on the phone. She was older in English, and also less fastidious; she was the parent to her parents. In Bangla, of course, they were still the parents, and she let them fuss over her, asking whether she was maintaining her weight, and if she'd been able to find her Horlicks in America.
Was there a person who existed beneath languages? That was the question. As a teenager, Amina had thought there was. She had believed that she'd been born with a soul whose thoughts were in no particular dialect, and she'd imagined that, when she married, her husband would be able to recognize this deep part of herself. She thought that this recognition was how she would recognize him. Of course she hadn't counted on her husband being a foreigner, a person who called her honey rather than Munni. In a way, George had created her American self, and so it made sense that it was the only one he would see." p. 105
"It seemed incredible that it could be the same road, the same asphalt, that they had traveled so many times together. You thought that you were the permanent part of your own experience, the net that held it all together -until you discovered that there were many selves, dissolving into one another so quickly over time that the buildings and the trees and even the pavement turned out to have more substance than you did." p. 207
"You were never alone in this country: there were so many warm bodies in such a small space that it was extremely unlikely to find a view without a human being in it." p. 242
"Now that he was here, it was enough. She thought that she'd like to prolong this moment before they'd spoken to each other, that if there were a way to live a whole lifetime in this proximity, without the complications of speech or action, that was how she could be happy. But he was walking toward her, ruining it, and she spoke from a nervous compulsion." p. 278
June 22, 2015
And I am back! Finally able to review a novel after months of wedding planning preparation, a fabulous day and honeymoon and now time to read and savor all the books I have stored up to get into--and this was my first one womp womp :(..I okay literally wanted to read this book because it was titled Newlyweds and I am now a proud one too but it was not at all what I expected..Okay so this is the story of a couple that met on the internet who get married but its more than that its also the story of a seemingly opportunistic and manipulative but ambitious woman, Amina,from Dhaka searching for an American husband and eventually finding one in bland and really undefined George who hides his own secret and is looking for a wife as well..The two converse online and he travels to her country and proposes then brings Amina to Rochester New York. This all happens in the first fifty or so pages so I was drawn in and interested in her adjustment to the United States and her first night with her husband, her culture shock and all the promise of the reveal of secrets but alas after that (which wasn't very well explained and explored given how interesting and powerful that could have been) the story dragged on with side family stories, complicated and ridiculous character lines and stories and an awkward, dry relationship with Amina and George you never really believe because the entire story she is scheming to bring her REAL plan to fruition--no not what you think to marry for love and be happy with her new family but to bring her parents over so they can take advantage of America's Medicare..hmm that was a little off and add to that the lack of character development and description and the boring anecdotes and family relationships I was not a fan but on the positive side I have ALOT of reading to do to make up for this one that left me kind of blah..:)
November 6, 2012
This book details the complexities and expectations accompanying a mixed race marriage between Amina, from Bangladesh, and George, an American. Despite the rave reviews about this book, I was disappointed - I didn't find their relationship that realistic, and knowing what I know about Asian cultures and their affinity with arranged marriages, I found it very hard to believe that Amina's parents would have let her go off to the US with a man she knew nothing about that she had independently found on the internet and never met. They seemed rather trusting and naive, and I didn't buy that they wouldn't have thought about her reputation and virtue and the consequences of their family standing as a result of allowing her to do this.
The story is mainly told from Amina's standpoint, and is unemotionally told, making it difficult to engage with what happens to her. George accuses her of using him as part of a plan to do the best for her family - her goal is to get her green card, and then get her parents over, safe from the conflicts and poverty they face in Desh, and I found her quite cold hearted in this respect, as she did seem to use George as a means to and end to achieve stability for her family. The book was also way too long, and boring in some parts (although I didn't know whether this was intentional, to convey the boring parts of everyday life in a relationship). What I did like was the author's descriptions of Bangladesh, and you could tell that she had done research into this area. But I didn't find this a convincing study of the intricacies of trying to navigate a mixed race relationship.
The story is mainly told from Amina's standpoint, and is unemotionally told, making it difficult to engage with what happens to her. George accuses her of using him as part of a plan to do the best for her family - her goal is to get her green card, and then get her parents over, safe from the conflicts and poverty they face in Desh, and I found her quite cold hearted in this respect, as she did seem to use George as a means to and end to achieve stability for her family. The book was also way too long, and boring in some parts (although I didn't know whether this was intentional, to convey the boring parts of everyday life in a relationship). What I did like was the author's descriptions of Bangladesh, and you could tell that she had done research into this area. But I didn't find this a convincing study of the intricacies of trying to navigate a mixed race relationship.
March 30, 2014
Reading the praise on the back of the book, I almost feel like I must have missed something.
I won't comment on the plot here because I feel it's irrelevant given the underdeveloped main characters. I don't feel I made it past the acquaintance stage with any of them, and the dialogue in the book falls flat in every major scene. Several key plot points turn around character interactions, and in each case the dialogue didn't feel natural or believable to me. Not only that, I didn't know the characters well enough to understand why they would have said what they said or reacted the way they did to someone else's words. For example,
Overall, this book just didn't feel successful to me. I wasn't really pulling for any of the characters, probably because I hadn't gotten to know them well enough, so the dramatic moments all fell flat and/or felt like they came out of left field.
I won't comment on the plot here because I feel it's irrelevant given the underdeveloped main characters. I don't feel I made it past the acquaintance stage with any of them, and the dialogue in the book falls flat in every major scene. Several key plot points turn around character interactions, and in each case the dialogue didn't feel natural or believable to me. Not only that, I didn't know the characters well enough to understand why they would have said what they said or reacted the way they did to someone else's words. For example,
Overall, this book just didn't feel successful to me. I wasn't really pulling for any of the characters, probably because I hadn't gotten to know them well enough, so the dramatic moments all fell flat and/or felt like they came out of left field.
June 9, 2012
I had a hard time putting this wonderful novel down. It's a story of a Bengali woman flying to Rochester, New York, to marry an American man she met online, and the lengths she goes to throughout the novel to bring her parents to America to live with them.
It was the best combination there can be in novels--a gripping plot (with lots of unexpected events) and great characterization. Also, I was truly surprised by the ending (and, although I found it somewhat sad and disappointing, was the more thought-provoking way it could have ended up).
There was a lot to ponder here in terms of cultural differences. Although the main character is Bengali, I found her easy to relate to and the cultural issues were illustrated well. There was a lot said and explored in this book about marriage, people's personalities within marriages, and different married couples' effects on those around them.
I really liked the structure of this book almost more than anything. Rather than a plot of increasing urgency that builds up to a single conflict at the end, there was a major conflict that occurred pretty much exactly halfway through the book, and from them on out, multiple other surprising plot twists occur. It kept me on my toes.
It was the best combination there can be in novels--a gripping plot (with lots of unexpected events) and great characterization. Also, I was truly surprised by the ending (and, although I found it somewhat sad and disappointing, was the more thought-provoking way it could have ended up).
There was a lot to ponder here in terms of cultural differences. Although the main character is Bengali, I found her easy to relate to and the cultural issues were illustrated well. There was a lot said and explored in this book about marriage, people's personalities within marriages, and different married couples' effects on those around them.
I really liked the structure of this book almost more than anything. Rather than a plot of increasing urgency that builds up to a single conflict at the end, there was a major conflict that occurred pretty much exactly halfway through the book, and from them on out, multiple other surprising plot twists occur. It kept me on my toes.
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