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THE IMPRESSIONIST

Name: THE IMPRESSIONIST
Author: Hari Kunzru
ISBN: 0-525-94642-X

by Hari Kunzru ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 1, 2002

Dazzling, nonetheless. Look for The Impressionist among next year’s Booker prize nominees.

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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

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
RED PILL
by Hari Kunzru

- BOOK REVIEW
WHITE TEARS
by Hari Kunzru

- BOOK REVIEW
TWICE UPON A TIME
by Hari Kunzru

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WITHOUT FAIL

From the Jack Reacher series , Vol. 6

by Lee Child ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 2001

Relentlessly suspenseful and unexpectedly timely: just the thing for Dick Cheney’s bedside reading wherever he’s keeping...

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When the newly elected Vice President’s life is threatened, the Secret Service runs to nomadic soldier-of-fortune Jack Reacher (Echo Burning, 2001, etc.) in this razor-sharp update of The Day of the Jackal and In the Line of Fire that’s begging to be filmed.

Why Reacher? Because M.E. Froelich, head of the VP’s protection team, was once a colleague and lover of his late brother Joe, who’d impressed her with tales of Jack’s derring-do as an Army MP. Now Froelich and her Brooks Brothers–tailored boss Stuyvesant have been receiving a series of anonymous messages threatening the life of North Dakota Senator/Vice President–elect Brook Armstrong. Since the threats may be coming from within the Secret Service’s own ranks—if they aren’t, it’s hard to see how they’ve been getting delivered—they can’t afford an internal investigation. Hence the call to Reacher, who wastes no time in hooking up with his old friend Frances Neagley, another Army vet turned private eye, first to see whether he can figure out a way to assassinate Armstrong, then to head off whoever else is trying. It’s Reacher’s matter-of-fact gift to think of everything, from the most likely position a sniper would assume at Armstrong’s Thanksgiving visit to a homeless shelter to the telltale punctuation of one of the threats, and to pluck helpers from the tiny cast who can fill the remaining gaps because they aren’t idiots or stooges. And it’s Child’s gift to keep tightening the screws, even when nothing’s happening except the arrival of a series of unsigned letters, and to convey a sense of the blank impossibility of guarding any public figure from danger day after highly exposed day, and the dedication and heroism of the agents who take on this daunting job.

Relentlessly suspenseful and unexpectedly timely: just the thing for Dick Cheney’s bedside reading wherever he’s keeping himself these days.

Pub Date: May 1, 2001

ISBN: 0-399-14861-2

Page Count: 384

Publisher: Putnam

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2002

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE SECRET
by Lee Child & Andrew Child

- BOOK REVIEW
NO PLAN B
by Lee Child & Andrew Child

- BOOK REVIEW
BETTER OFF DEAD
by Lee Child & Andrew Child

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THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

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The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.