I picked up this book in the library the minute I saw it which I normally don’t do much but it had Taslima Nasreen as a writer and her Lajja is my all time favorite book, what a book that was… outstanding.
The French lover is primarily a story of “Nina” a bengali woman who married a Punjabi guy to get away from her country, to get away from a lot of memories she can’t deal with and hoping that life will become beautiful with that.
However reality is totally different and instead of enjoying Paris she is confined to her house and treated almost as a maid and an object to satisfy the physical needs of the man
Eventually she cuts herself away from the man she calls husband and starts to explore Paris and herself in her own terms.
It’s a story of a woman who deals with her own confused self, her sexuality, her need for someone in forgein land. The story has amazing potential and inspite of having a great plot somehow this book didn’t work for me.
I still can’t put a finger of what exactly I didn’t like in the book, may be it was the fact Nina was really too confused and uncertain, a character I certainly couldn’t relate too. Also the fact the she was out to discover her sexuality makes it acceptable to have certain steamy scenes in the book but somehow I thought it was a tad over done at places… At times almost felt like a raunchy soft porn book ;-)
Or may be it was the fact the characters in the book were really stereo typed… not even one man is good, all of them portrayed skin seeking hungry wolves and the women as alba naaris who just have to go thru the torture in a man dominated world…
All in all a book which had awesome potential but failed to cash on it…
Rating 2.5/5
Book The French Lover
Authors Taslima Nasrin
PS: I found this in my drafts today, completed but I have no clue why I didn’t publish it before may be I forgot about it, so here it is….
