Brick Lane

Presentation This document is composed of a text and a photo picturing its author. The text is an extract from a novel entitled Brick Lane which was written by Monica Ali and published in 2003. It was named after Brick Lane, a street at the heart of London's Bangladeshi community. It follows the life of Nazneen, a Bangladeshi woman who moves to Tower Hamlets in London at the age of 18 (her English consisting of "sorry" and "thank you") to marry an older man, Chanu, described by The Observer as "one of the novel's foremost miracles: twice her age, with a face like a frog, a tendency to quote Hume and the boundless doomed optimism of the self-improvement junkie, he is both exasperating and, to the reader at least, enormously loveable." This passage, which is mainly caracterized by conversations, deals with an immigrant to England called Chanu, who wanted to take his family to visit London before leaving it for good.

Summary

Even though we haven't got any specific indication, we know that the scene takes place in the early 21th century in a neighborhood of London. More precisely, « on a hot saturday morning towards the end of July » line 11. The main character is a man, called Chanu, who leave in London for twenty or thirty years. We know he is an immigrant. We can't assume his age just considering the text but he might probably be over 60 (« thirty or so years after he arrived in London » line 1 and « I've spent more than half my life here » line 12). The other four caracters are the members of his family, called Nazneen, Shahana and Bibi and a bus conductor. In the passage, he wanted, as he decided to leave England, to take his family to see museums in London. They went on a bus with a big lunch. As he tought the bus knows, he asked the conductor which tourist attraction to visit. Instead of answering, the man asked him where he was from and Chanu admitted he actually lives in London. This exerpt could be divided into three parts :