Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard - Softcover

Desai, Kiran

3.47

5,979 ratings by Goodreads

9780571193363: Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0571193366 ISBN 13: 9780571193363

Publisher: Faber and Faber, 1998

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After years of failure at school and work, and of spending his days dreaming in the tea stalls and singing to himself in the public gardens, it doesn't seem as if Sampath Chawla is going to amount to much. But then he climbs a guava tree and becomes unexpectedly famous as a hermit.

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Review:

Born during a torrential rainstorm, in Shahkot, India, to a mother whom the neighbours find distinctly odd, Sampath Chawla is a disappointment to his family. Nothing but trouble from the start, he disgraces himself at a wedding party, loses his job at the local post office and runs away from home to take refuge in the guava orchard, at the top of a guava tree. There he is mistaken for a holy man and seer when he reveals intimate secrets about the local inhabitants (gleaned from reading their mail in idle moments at the post office). His father can see there is money, at last, to be made from his idle son and sets about doing so with determination. A local journalist, however, is equally determined to unmask him. Although Desai writes with considerable flair, employing an inventive style of English reminiscent of a line of Indian authors from Salman Rushdie to Arundhati Roy, there is something tiresome about this relentlessly perky comedy, and one has a slight suspicion that the European reader is being hoodwinked with fashionable pastiche. Midnight's Children has a lot to answer for. -- Lisa Jardine

Book Description:

Kiran Desai's Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard is the charming and acclaimed debut novel from the author of The Inheritance of Loss, which won the Man Booker Prize in 2006.

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