The Impressionist - Softcover

Kunzru, Hari

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0141008288 ISBN 13: 9780141008288

Publisher: Penguin, 2003

Synopsis

A sweeping, colourful adventure from the acclaimed author of White Tears

Discover Hari Kunzru's smash-hit debut novel

This is the extraordinary story of a child conceived in a wild monsoon night, a boy destined to be an outsider, a man with many names and no name.

Born into luxury but disinherited and cast out onto the streets of Agra, Pran Nath must become a chameleon. Chasing his fortune, he will travel from the red light district of Bombay to the green lawns of England to the unmapped African wilderness. He will play many different roles -- a young prize in a brothel, the adopted son of Scottish missionaries, the impeccably educated young Englishman headed for Oxford -- in order to find the role that will finally fit.

Daring and riotously inventive, The Impressionist is an odyssey of self-discovery: a tale of the many lives one man can live and of the universal search for true identity.

About this title

Review:

The anti-hero of The Impressionist, Hari Kunzru's daringly ambitious first novel, is half-English and half-Indian. In the Raj of the 1920s the racial and social divides are enormous but Pran Nath is able to bridge them, crossing from one side to another in a series of reinventions of his own personality. He begins as the spoilt child of an Indian lawyer but circumstances thrust him out of his pampered adolescence into the teeming and dangerous life of the streets. After a bewildering period as one of the pawns in Machiavellian political and sexual scheming at the decadent court of a minor Maharajah, he escapes to Bombay. There he is taken up by a half-demented Scottish missionary and his wife but prefers to slope off to the city's red light district whenever he can. During a time of riot and bloodshed the chance of recreating himself as an English schoolboy, destined for public school and Oxford, presents itself and he takes it. Even this is not to be his final transformation, however.

In some ways Kunzru is almost too ambitious. There is so much crammed into the pages of The Impressionist that some of it, almost inevitably, doesn't work as well as it might. However, as the shape-shifting Pran Nath moves from one identity to another, knockabout farce mixes with satire, social comedy with parody. And, beneath the comic exuberance and linguistic invention, there is an intelligent and occasionally moving examination of notions of self, identity and what it means to belong to a class or society. --Nick Rennison

Review:

Publisher's description. Discover an odyssey of self-discovery, as one child born different must find his way and his place in the world. From the streets of Agra to Bombay's red light district, from the pristine, cloistered lawns of Oxford to an expedition in West Africa - Pran Nath is a boy who will have many faces, many names, many lives... (Penguin)

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0141008288
• ISBN 13: 9780141008288
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 496