A lyrical meditation on love, friendship and finding bliss in destiny.
Spun from the lush, rich culture of India, Amin debuts with the story of Kalu, who finds his destiny in raag.
Raag is music, a classical expression of India’s soul, and Kalu is a boy who arrives in the village of Hastinapore with no memory of family or home. To survive, Kalu accepts any chore. Ganga Ba, a widow, begins watching over him, and her servant girl, Malti, becomes Kalu's surrogate sister. Then, a night creature bites Kalu’s foot, causing it to swell, fester and reek of infection. Unable to work, lurking half-starved in a banyan tree, Kalu rolls up a leaf and plays a musical note of absolute purity. Vaid Dada, an itinerant healer resting in the shade, hears the music. When he discovers young Kalu, Vaid Dada treats the injured foot and leaves Kalu to recuperate in Ganga Ba’s house, telling Kalu that upon his return, he will ask for payment. While Vaid Dada is absent, Kalu slips away to a cave beneath an old tree. There, he finds a large curved black stone, a shiv-ling, a symbol of Lord Shiva. He begins practicing with a little plastic flute. One day, he mesmerizes a magnificent cobra into dance. Afterward, Kalu unearths a beautiful rosewood flute. Vaid Dada returns and tells Kalu his payment will require Kalu to follow him to the mountain retreat of Vaid Dada’s brother, a reclusive musician who retired when “applause and adulation became more important than…the music itself.” As the tale unfolds, Kalu becomes surrogate son to his mentor, Guruji, blossoming, learning to experience all that is real and true through music. In a secondary narrative focusing on the changing place of India’s women, Amin follows Malti into an unhappy arranged marriage, then divorce and independence. Delicate, sometimes meditative and rich with allusions to India’s spirit as expressed through music, the novel offers readers color and culture, poverty and riches, through every sensory perception.
A lyrical meditation on love, friendship and finding bliss in destiny.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4516-7204-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Oct. 31, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2012
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...
An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.
Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad. The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized). As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses). Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture. Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year.Pub Date: March 6, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-70376-4
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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