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Title: An intimate tragedy in the Greek tradition.
Review: A clerical error, a single letter, leads each character to take predictable steps, one by one, until things spiral out of control and there's no way out but further in. At the end of Part I, I felt an enormous satisfaction with the story, closed the book, and said, "That is enough. It can end right here." But Dubus has much more, and another character, incidental in the first half, becomes embedded in the second half and leads the story to its inevitably tragic conclusion. Dubus creates exceptionally detailed characters with a blending of flaws and strengths that intermix to form very real people. I have not seen the recent film, and don't plan to, but the actors cast as Behrani (Ben Kingsley) and Kathy (Jennifer Connelly) fit very well and made the book visualization so very very simple.
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