This enchanting first novel, set in the Indian village of Shakhot, details the agreeable chaos that ensues from its underachieving protagonist’s decision to abandon the workaday world and live in a tree. Sampath Chawla was born during an insufferably hot summer (when “The bees flew drunk on nectar that had turned alcoholic”) at the precise moment that a Red Cross plane delivering supplies to “famine camps” inadvertently showered its bounty on grateful Shakhot. This wry allusion to Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children is only one of numerous grace notes in a beguiling narrative that displays its character’s eccentricities abundantly while never reducing them to caricatures. Sampath, at 20 having become a morose failure as a postal employee, attains widespread celebrity when his matter-of-fact revelations, delivered from the guava tree where he’s taken residence, show a deep knowledge of his neighbors’ secrets (he’s gained it from secretly reading their mail), convincing all and sundry that “the Hermit of Shakhot” is “one of an unusual spiritual nature, his childlike ways being coupled with unfathomable wisdom.” Things grow more complicated when a passel of “cinema monkeys” (so named for their harassment of female moviegoers) join Sampath in his tree, the Atheist Society arranges surveillance of his “activity,” and a research scientist, a retired Brigadier, a police superintendent, and other suspicious citizens lock horns with a hastily assembled Monkey Protection Society. Desai’s affectionate scrutiny of her maladroit protagonist is further sweetened, as it were, by deft comic portraits of Sampath’s family, including most memorably his food-fixated mother Kulfi and his desperate father, a “practical” martinet who laments: “What good is it to be the head of a family when you had a son who ran and sat in a tree?— Newcomer Desai is the daughter of highly praised Indian novelist Anita Desai. It’s a pleasure to report that this particular fruit of a distinguished literary lineage, having fallen rather far from the tree, is producing bountiful and delicious results. (First printing of 50,000, author tour)
Pub Date: May 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-87113-711-9
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
Rather than settle for a coming-of-age or travails-of-immigrants story, Hosseini has folded them both into this searing...
Here’s a real find: a striking debut from an Afghan now living in the US. His passionate story of betrayal and redemption is framed by Afghanistan’s tragic recent past.
Moving back and forth between Afghanistan and California, and spanning almost 40 years, the story begins in Afghanistan in the tranquil 1960s. Our protagonist Amir is a child in Kabul. The most important people in his life are Baba and Hassan. Father Baba is a wealthy Pashtun merchant, a larger-than-life figure, fretting over his bookish weakling of a son (the mother died giving birth); Hassan is his sweet-natured playmate, son of their servant Ali and a Hazara. Pashtuns have always dominated and ridiculed Hazaras, so Amir can’t help teasing Hassan, even though the Hazara staunchly defends him against neighborhood bullies like the “sociopath” Assef. The day, in 1975, when 12-year-old Amir wins the annual kite-fighting tournament is the best and worst of his young life. He bonds with Baba at last but deserts Hassan when the latter is raped by Assef. And it gets worse. With the still-loyal Hassan a constant reminder of his guilt, Amir makes life impossible for him and Ali, ultimately forcing them to leave town. Fast forward to the Russian occupation, flight to America, life in the Afghan exile community in the Bay Area. Amir becomes a writer and marries a beautiful Afghan; Baba dies of cancer. Then, in 2001, the past comes roaring back. Rahim, Baba’s old business partner who knows all about Amir’s transgressions, calls from Pakistan. Hassan has been executed by the Taliban; his son, Sohrab, must be rescued. Will Amir wipe the slate clean? So he returns to the hell of Taliban-ruled Afghanistan and reclaims Sohrab from a Taliban leader (none other than Assef) after a terrifying showdown. Amir brings the traumatized child back to California and a bittersweet ending.
Rather than settle for a coming-of-age or travails-of-immigrants story, Hosseini has folded them both into this searing spectacle of hard-won personal salvation. All this, and a rich slice of Afghan culture too: irresistible.Pub Date: June 2, 2003
ISBN: 1-57322-245-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2003
SEEN & HEARD
IN THE NEWS
IN THE NEWS
A somewhat fragmentary nocturnal shadows Jim Nightshade and his friend Will Halloway, born just before and just after midnight on the 31st of October, as they walk the thin line between real and imaginary worlds. A carnival (evil) comes to town with its calliope, merry-go-round and mirror maze, and in its distortion, the funeral march is played backwards, their teacher's nephew seems to assume the identity of the carnival's Mr. Cooger. The Illustrated Man (an earlier Bradbury title) doubles as Mr. Dark. comes for the boys and Jim almost does; and there are other spectres in this freakshow of the mind, The Witch, The Dwarf, etc., before faith casts out all these fears which the carnival has exploited... The allusions (the October country, the autumn people, etc.) as well as the concerns of previous books will be familiar to Bradbury's readers as once again this conjurer limns a haunted landscape in an allegory of good and evil. Definitely for all admirers.
Pub Date: June 15, 1962
ISBN: 0380977273
Page Count: 312
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: March 20, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1962
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