Do not try this at home.
A young New Yorker goes to India to seek enlightenment.
“In the Bhagavad Gita, Arjuna’s sorrow shows him the path to unite with the universal consciousness.…Your discontent with the world as it is will lead you to your union.” Bajaj’s debut novel updates the classic formula of the yogic quest, from the first glimmer of dissatisfaction with worldly things all the way to universal consciousness in a frozen cave. Here, the disillusioned householder is a young Wall Street analyst named Max, the son of a Greek immigrant mother who managed get him out of the projects and off to Harvard. But when she dies of cancer, the meaninglessness of his existence overwhelms him. Inspired by a lunchtime conversation with an Indian falafel vendor, he goes back to the office, “switches over from Excel to Chrome and [begins] searching the Internet for information about Himalayan yogis.” Within days, he’s on a plane to Delhi. All the steps and missteps of Max’s path, including ashrams, gurus, false leads, long hikes under terrible conditions, and a panoply of extreme spiritual practices and privations are dramatized in exhaustive detail. “Max walked to the edge of the lake and concentrated on the caves on the opposite side. Closing his eyes, he inhaled and exhaled one hundred and eighty times….He retained his breath ten, twelve, fifteen, seventeen minutes….Next he exhaled quickly….Max performed samyama on his navel and visualized every root nerve of his body alive with the same stream of minute energy particles that the water in front of him was. He took a step forward. Energy merged with energy. There was nothing under his feet.”
Do not try this at home.Pub Date: May 3, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-59463-411-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2016
In part a perfectly paced mystery story, in part an Indian Wuthering Heights: a gorgeous and seductive fever dream of a...
A brilliantly constructed first novel that untangles an intricate web of sexual and caste conflict in a vivid style reminiscent of Salman Rushdie's early work.
The major characters are Estha and Rahel, the fraternal twin son and daughter of a wealthy family living in the province of Kerala. The family's prosperity is derived from a pickle factory and rubber estate, and their prideful Anglophilia essentially estranges them from their country's drift toward Communism and their ``inferiors' '' hunger for independence and equality. The events of a crucial December day in 1969—including an accidental death that may have been no accident and the violent consequences that afflict an illicit couple who have broken "the Love Law''—are the moral and narrative center around which the episodes of the novel repeatedly circle. Shifting backward and forward in time with effortless grace, Roy fashions a compelling nexus of personalities that influence the twins' "eerie stealth'' and furtive interdependence. These include their beautiful and mysteriously remote mother Ammu; her battling "Mammachi'' (who runs the pickle factory) and "Pappachi'' (an insufficiently renowned entomologist); their Oxford-educated Marxist Uncle Chacko and their wily "grandaunt'' Baby Kochamma; and the volatile laborite "Untouchable'' Velutha, whose relationship with the twins' family will prove his undoing. Roy conveys their explosive commingling in a vigorous prose dominated by odd syntactical and verbal combinations and coinages (a bad dream experience during midday nap-time is an "aftermare'') reminiscent of Gerard Manly Hopkins's "sprung rhythm,'' incantatory repetitions, striking metaphors (Velutha is seen ``standing in the shade of the rubber trees with coins of sunshine dancing on his body'') and sensuous descriptive passages (``The sky was orange, and the coconut trees were sea anemones waving their tentacles, hoping to trap and eat an unsuspecting cloud'').
In part a perfectly paced mystery story, in part an Indian Wuthering Heights: a gorgeous and seductive fever dream of a novel, and a truly spectacular debut. (First serial to Granta)Pub Date: May 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-679-45731-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
The sequel and conclusion to Rice's The Witching Hour (1990) shows Rice both at her best and at her hackiest. Volume One brought forth the Mayfair Witches, an incestuous family in New Orleans' steamy Garden District, headed by supersurgeon Rowan Mayfair, who is putting some of the family's seven-and-a-half billion into the Mayfair Medical Institute. At that novel's end, Rowan had given birth to an "entity" on the living-room rug that, assuming human shape, had nearly killed husband Michael in the swimming pool, then abducted Rowan. Now the evil being—which looks like Durer's Christ and has been using witches in the Mayfair line to have itself reborn after dying time and again since the earliest days of the Reformation in Scotland— is skipping about Europe while trying to breed with Rowan and give birth to a female demon. But these porny pages don't arrive until we wade through 200 tediously undramatic sheets of dialogue filler quite lacking in storytelling oomph—though we are treated to teenygenius Mona Mayfair's seduction of the recovering Michael. All this is a case of background detail turning story into tapestry. Once Rice plunges us into Rowan's long rape, two miscarriages, and at last the birth of Emaleth, sister/wife for Rowan's demonic son Lasher, the novel lights up with rocket blast. How will Rowan escape her tyrant son, whose endless suckling and inseminating keeps her constantly orgasmic and horrified? But pigging out on Rowan's plight takes up only about 200 pages all told, and then more background filler—well, the novel's huge mythic underpinning- -dims our spirits, although the story of Uncle Julien, as told by Julien's ghost to Michael, dances nicely. Too much Rice-A-Roni, but addicts will lick the pot.
Pub Date: Oct. 15, 1993
ISBN: 0-679-41295-6
Page Count: 608
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1993
BOOK TO SCREEN
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