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Title: Creepy and confusing
Review: Jhabvala had a story in The New Yorker in 2008 ("The Teacher") with many similar themes, arcs, situations, and characters to Three Continents. The former seems a careful, more mature distillation of all the best parts of the latter, and perhaps that is what it was meant to be.Three Continents, published in 1987 (two years after Jhabvala won the Booker for Heat and Dust), is a repetitive and unsatisfying book, and there is something about the way she writes lovemaking that just seems Harlequinny, but Jhabvala's sharp characterizations and shrewdness about the inextricable nature of the political and the personal make Three Continents an arresting, if creepy read.Harriet never redeems herself the way you hope she will (and it is the inherent intelligence of Jhabvala's prose that kept this reader hoping for redemption even as the pages in her fingertips dwindled), and this is a very hard, sadistic thing to justify from an author-reader relationship standpoint.
