Dazzling, nonetheless. Look for The Impressionist among next year’s Booker prize nominees.
This already much-touted first novel, a major international commercial success, is its Anglo-Kashmiri author’s refreshingly original variation on the traditional theme of a young man’s education.
The protagonist is Indian-born Pran Nath Razdan, ostensibly the son of a prosperous Hindu lawyer, but in fact the biracial product of his late (“mad”) mother’s single illicit encounter with an English adventurer (also deceased). When the truth is learned, 15-year-old Pran is exiled (in 1918) from “his father’s” lavish home in Agra (near the Taj Mahal), wanders the city’s meaner streets, then is abducted and sold as a “hijra” (or “boy-girl” prostitute) to an epicurean Nawab. Attracting the attention of pedophilic Major Privett-Clampe, Pran (who easily “passes” for white) survives by his wits and his astonishing good looks, moving on to Bombay, where he’s accepted as “Robert” by Scottish missionary Andrew Macfarlane and his wife Elspeth (grieving the deaths of two soldier sons in battle) – and as “Pretty Bobby” by the Bombay whores who employ him as an errand boy. As Britain’s control of India becomes increasingly shaky, “Bobby” (who finds he’s repeatedly “free to reinvent himself”) appropriates the identity of a drunken young Englishman who’s the victim of mob violence, and travels to London as “Jonathan Bridgeman.” From there he progresses to private school and university (Oxford), a frustrated affair with would-be demimondaine Astarte Chapel, and, as assistant to her father (a famous “Africanist” anthropologist), goes to West Africa to study the ecology of the Fotse tribe, where Pran/Bobby/Jonathan assumes yet another (transfiguring) identity. Echoes of Waugh, Kipling, Bowles, and Rushdie (and perhaps a minor debt to Michael Pye’s Taking Lives) aside, this is a very considerable achievement: a romantic-satiric saga enlivened by Kunzru’s sophisticated prose and urbane omniscient narrative voice. Its only significant flaws are a rather rapid march through some key episodes and some heavy-handed satire on colonialism at its most arrogantly obtuse.
Dazzling, nonetheless. Look for The Impressionist among next year’s Booker prize nominees.Pub Date: April 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-525-94642-X
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2002
Absolutely enthralling. Read it.
A young Irish couple gets together, splits up, gets together, splits up—sorry, can't tell you how it ends!
Irish writer Rooney has made a trans-Atlantic splash since publishing her first novel, Conversations With Friends, in 2017. Her second has already won the Costa Novel Award, among other honors, since it was published in Ireland and Britain last year. In outline it's a simple story, but Rooney tells it with bravura intelligence, wit, and delicacy. Connell Waldron and Marianne Sheridan are classmates in the small Irish town of Carricklea, where his mother works for her family as a cleaner. It's 2011, after the financial crisis, which hovers around the edges of the book like a ghost. Connell is popular in school, good at soccer, and nice; Marianne is strange and friendless. They're the smartest kids in their class, and they forge an intimacy when Connell picks his mother up from Marianne's house. Soon they're having sex, but Connell doesn't want anyone to know and Marianne doesn't mind; either she really doesn't care, or it's all she thinks she deserves. Or both. Though one time when she's forced into a social situation with some of their classmates, she briefly fantasizes about what would happen if she revealed their connection: "How much terrifying and bewildering status would accrue to her in this one moment, how destabilising it would be, how destructive." When they both move to Dublin for Trinity College, their positions are swapped: Marianne now seems electric and in-demand while Connell feels adrift in this unfamiliar environment. Rooney's genius lies in her ability to track her characters' subtle shifts in power, both within themselves and in relation to each other, and the ways they do and don't know each other; they both feel most like themselves when they're together, but they still have disastrous failures of communication. "Sorry about last night," Marianne says to Connell in February 2012. Then Rooney elaborates: "She tries to pronounce this in a way that communicates several things: apology, painful embarrassment, some additional pained embarrassment that serves to ironise and dilute the painful kind, a sense that she knows she will be forgiven or is already, a desire not to 'make a big deal.' " Then: "Forget about it, he says." Rooney precisely articulates everything that's going on below the surface; there's humor and insight here as well as the pleasure of getting to know two prickly, complicated people as they try to figure out who they are and who they want to become.
Absolutely enthralling. Read it.Pub Date: April 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-984-82217-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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"This soil," concludes the young narrator of this quiet chronicle of garrotted innocence, "is bad for all kinds of flowers. Certain seeds it will not nurture, certain fruit it will not bear." And among the exclusions of white rural Ohio, echoed by black respectability, is ugly, black, loveless, twelve-year-old Pecola. But in a world where blue-eyed gifts are clucked over and admired, and the Pecolas are simply not seen, there is always the possibility of the dream and wish—for blue eyes. Born of a mother who adjusted her life to the clarity and serenity of white households and "acquired virtues that were easy to maintain" and a father, Cholly, stunted by early rejections and humiliations, Pecola just might have been loved—for in raping his daughter Cholly did at least touch her. But "Love is never better than the lover," and with the death of her baby, the child herself, accepting absolutely the gift of blue eyes from a faith healer (whose perverse interest in little girls does not preclude understanding), inches over into madness. A skillful understated tribute to the fall of a sparrow for whose small tragedy there was no watching eye.
Pub Date: Oct. 29, 1970
ISBN: 0375411550
Page Count: -
Publisher: Holt Rinehart & Winston
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1970
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