House of Sand and Fog [Unabridged]

Rating:
Summary: Nonsense.
Review: When I began reading this novel I became very annoyed with the consistent use of the names "Lester" and "Kathy". When there are only two people having a conversation what is the need of consistently addressing them by their first name? "How are you Lester? Thank you Lester. Put your gun away Lester." "Fine Kathy. Thank you Kathy. The sun is shining Kathy." Ugh. Boring.

As I got farther and farther along in this book, a lot more became annoying.

First, I absolutely hate the premise that Kathy gets involved with Lester - and Lester with Kathy - even though he is a married man with two children. Please, get some respect for yourself Kathy. And grow up and be a real man, Lester.

Secondly, the male author Dubus portrays Kathy as a totally pathetic human being. Friendless - liar - poor - unmotivated - nonrespected - drunk - suicidal tendencies and uncontrollable behavior.

Somewhere in the novel Lester's character becomes even more unsavory and he takes on the psycho qualities of Kathy and expands upon them. His relationship with the Behrani family and the way he treats them in their home is ridiculous and completely unbelievable. Lester sacrifices his job and his sanity for the 'love' of a woman he has known for two weeks? Please. She is as useful to him as a plastic blow-up doll would be. There is no way he would risk his life and career by doing the things he does in the novel - as far as his irrational and psychotic behavior towards the Behrani's - for a woman that he knows so little about. The only thing he really knows about Kathy is what color underpants she is wearing that day.

I found myself laughing at the unbelievably ridiculousness of it all. I'm glad that I didn't actually spend money on this book, because if I did I would have a credit at the bookstore after returning this crapola.

Rating:
Summary: Fabulous book and great film!
Review: Great story of bad choices and human frailties. The ending left me slack jawed and very upset about Kathy's final scene. I would recommend this to all who love unpredictable stories.

Rating:
Summary: House of Cards
Review: Anybody who has lived in San Francisco or its surrounding area for more than a month or so knows that you don't call the city, "Frisco." It just isn't done. To do so is a sure way to identify yourself as a rube or a hayseed. That residents of the Bay Area in this novel on more than one occasion refer to the city as "Frisco," is a small but very telling example of the careless way in which this novel was written. It is, in fact, sloppy and careless in just about every respect.

The story has to do with an ignorant, drug-addicted, alcoholic American female who loses her San Francisco-area home because she is too lazy to open the mail, and fails to see the notices from the county that she owes taxes on the place. An Iranian immigrant, formerly a colonel in the Shah's army, purchases the place at auction and moves in with his family. To prove to her family that she is not a nitwit, the female decides she is going to get the place back. He, having legally purchased the place, naturally refuses. If this doesn't sound very interesting, it is because it isn't.

The story, for this first half anyway, is told in alternating chapters and in the first person by both. It is a tactic that fails miserably. To show that he is an Iranian immigrant, the author has him write sentences like this: "I tell to myself I must return to draw an arrow upon it." This works okay for a few pages but after a very short while, what little verisimilitude created is overcome by what in reality is just plain-old, bad writing. There is no flow, no style, no melody; it is instead just choppy and awkward.

The female effort fails in that her writing style does not correspond with her personality. She is a barely-recovered cocaine addict, her husband has left her, she spends her days in a stupor watching videos, she's incapable of pronouncing the Iranian's name correctly, and she's such a slug she can't even manage an effort to open her mail. Yet she writes pretty well, with a seeming intelligent understanding of that which is going on around her, and she's apparently gorgeous. (It was a shock to hear another character describe her this way. Everything pointed to her being unkempt and overweight.) In short, her character doesn't make sense. She's not real to us.

Both of these huge problems could have potentially been corrected by simply writing these narratives in the third person, especially since there is no reason for there to have been a first person narrative to begin with. (What are these things? Diaries? Journals? Creative Writing exercises?) In any event, about half way through, and faced with the surmounting problems he has created for himself, the author finally adds a narrative in the third person, which helps somewhat, but the damage is already terminal.

But this isn't even the worst of it. It turns out it was the county that cheated the female out of her home, and that the Iranian fellow really does have legal title to it. But the logical thing--suing the county--doesn't occur to her. Instead, and with her new-found boyfriend--a married deputy sheriff no less--she begins a campaign of criminal harassment against the Iranian family which improbably ends in kidnapping, suicide, murder and other ludicrous mayhem. It essentially becomes a script for the latest made-for-TV slop-of-the-week, or more appropriately, a script satirizing it. It is truly that bad.

But then any novel which shows a character smoking cigarettes with impunity in a restaurant on the top floor of a downtown San Francisco hotel--or for that matter any California restaurant for the last ten years or so--is clearly one which does not take itself seriously.

Rating:
Summary: house with no foundation
Review: First of all, I like flawed characters. I hate when I sense the writer is trying to protect his or her characters from the natural consequences of their actions. This certainly was not the case here! Yet, flawed characters can be likeable - but none of "House's" were. I sympathized with the Colonel, as bullheaded as he was, until he started beating his wife. As for Kathy, I simply could not believe it took as long as it did for her to start feeling the pinch of not paying any bills. That strained credibility.

I am not a fan of multiple viewpoints (popular as they are), yet I could have stayed with the book if it had just been Kathy and the Colonel alternating. But Lester's backstory was introduced too late in the book for me to care what was driving him anymore. At first he seemed just a sweet lunkhead-type guy willing to help the proverbial damsel in distress, then he turned into a stalker straight out of a Lifetime Channel movie. At that point, I only cared about the Colonel's wife and son, but it wasn't enough for me to finish the book. And let me just add that I finish at least 99 percent of the books I read.

Rating:
Summary: Good story, good characters, but writing and ending is poor
Review: House of Sand And Fog....interesting story about Colonel Beharmi; a former Iranian Air Force colonel under the Shah, then came the Islamic Revolution of 1979 where he and his family fled the country to live in the U.S. because if they went back to Iran, then they would be killed by the Mullah's because he served the Shah which what happen his fellow men in his govermnent. Now once a rich man in Iran, he is now picking up trash on the highway, so in order to restore his family's honor, he discovers a house being auction by the county, so he gets the money and moves in with this wife Nadi and his son Ismail. Now we meet Kathy; a recovering drunk and drug abuser who discovers that her house is being auctioned without her constent because the county said that she owned taxes which she didnt know about until they evicted her out of her apartment. Then with this struggle with Beharmi, then Kathy meet Lester; a cop with a nice family and wife. He then joins her struggle to get back the house, but it ends in disaster. The failure to understand each other hurts even more, Beharmi is used to a society where women do what the men tell them, and they have to wear the hijab as due to Islamic faith, but since they dont understand each other, things just get worst than better. The characters are good, but sometimes I felt the writing to this book was very poor and Andre Dubus III didnt get to the point most of the time in this book. The characters made some stupid mistakes in the book, like when Lester breaks into their home and locks them in the bathroom, I found that very unrealistic on his part because Lester didnt act intelligent enough or made any good points about what should of been done since he felt like he was in charge because he had a gun. It is just human nature for someone to have power over someone when they have a weapon that can kill them instantly. The book makes a couple of good points about American society; where every American wants things their way or they would sue them for something stupid like wrong food order or not being fast enough, or having trees inside the restaurant which someone can get allergies all of a sudden. If House Of Sand And Fog was written by a much more better writer; Stephen King would be good, then I would think that it would of ended differently and the writing would of made more sense because Andre Dubus III can make good characters, but he needs to work on his writing a little bit more.

Rating:
Summary: UGH!
Review: Dubus is for the most part a great storyteller but has redefined the term "fiction" with this storyline! With the unrealistic plot of a former druggie's house being sold as a result of an error in clerical work, he forces the reader to feel nearly nothing towards his protagonist, "Kath" and the supposed antagonists, this innocent Middle Eastern family who uses the opportunity of purchasing the "seized" house to better their lives in the States. The "book" begins to run like a made for TV movie with its lame and depressing ending! New definition for UGH!

Rating:
Summary: The House of Sand and Fog
Review: The only book I've read that was more intense than this one, was Jackson McCrae's THE BARK OF THE DOGWOOD. And while that book was at times funny, it was also extremely disturbing and VERY intense! But HOUSE OF SAND AND FOG is also intense and the character-driven plot is excellent! No, this is not a perfect book (what book is?) but it's better than most of the other things out there. I highly recommend this stellar read, and if you find yourself not liking it, just wait--give it a chance, because it DOES make sense if you know where to look.

Rating:
Summary: Promising plot, poorly executed
Review: This is a piece of popular fiction, so I wasn't expecting literature and didn't hold it to that standard. Still, a more skilled author and a decent editor could have made a really good "read" out of this plot: a bureaucratic error creates two victims, the Colonel, an Iranian exile for whom the bargain-priced house represents the last best chance for his family, and Kathy, the "recovering" lush and cocaine addict for whom the house is the last thing she has.

We begin with the Colonel, and though clearly the author's intent was to have our sympathies shift from him to Kathy and back again along with the shifting first-person narrations, that never happened for me, because though Kathy's character is certainly pathetic, she arouses little sympathy. The author gave me no reason to like her. But the most poorly drawn and completely unpersuasive character is that of Lester, the cop who jettisons all for Kathy. Why? The author never makes that case. Because Lester's motivations and actions are crucial to the denouement, Lester's unbelievability makes the climax of this story unpersuasive. It made me angry, but it didn't move me, because I didn't buy it.

One detail that illustrates the story's unbelievability is that Kathy's family back East has no idea what's happened until her mother flies out and sees the house wrapped in police tape. The story takes place in the 1990's, when CNN and the other round-the-clock networks would have sent this "believe it or not" story not only around the nation, but around the world. Come on, author.

As to the poor editing, I'd estimate that about 100 of the book's 365 pages are pure filler.

Rating:
Summary: Great literature-a classic!
Review: REviewers seem confused by this book. It is possible to read a novel and not like ANY character. The main three characters in House of Sand and Fog are desperately flawed. That's what makes the book readable. We know they are headed for disaster.
Of course the plot is implausible. But who cares? The author is going for the struggle of being a human being here.
For those who are bothered by the sexuality, lighten up! We are all sexual beings and how better to show the desperate animal nature of Kathy and Lester than by having them partake?
Sex is just another addiction of Kathy's.
What a boring book it would be if the main characters were pillars of morality. I say, the more flaws the better!
Macbeth, anyone?

Rating:
Summary: Foggy Prejudice
Review: As an anglo-Iranian who's just seen the movie, I've been very intrigued by your reviews.... How extreme they are.
I must say, the one thing that rings true in this story, and the film brings out superbly through Nadi (and Shohreh's Oscar Nomination) - is the kindness inherent in Iranian culture. Or Persian culture, if the word Iran still makes you cringe!
Iranians have all kinds of flaws, but there is a kindness of soul that is unique to the Iranian culture. My guess is that after 25 years of US propaganda, for some readers, it would be really hard to stomach anything positive about Eye-Ran.
In the case of those individuals, I'd recommend they read "All the Shah's Men" by Kinser - and then have a second thought as to who deserves to be having any begrudging sentiments...
Iran is a 2500 year old culture with Cyrus the Great the world's first emperor to display compassion towards all cultures; not to mention the author of the world's first charter on human rights.
Some may then be tempted to point a finger at how fanatic the leadership is - if you are American, again I would recommend reading Kinser's book.
This movie wasn't my absolute favourite, which is why it didn't get my full 5 stars. But I thoroughly enjoyed, after 25 years of propaganda and nonsense, to be viewing a Hollywood movie that moved the camera by that crucial 8mm to show not the fanatic and the hoodlum in "Iran", but a 2500 year old heritage known for compassion, fairness and humanity.