The Blue Bedspread (a format) - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0330392344 ISBN 13: 9780330392341

Publisher: Picador, 2000

Synopsis

In the middle of a steamy Calcutta night the phone rings. An unnamed man in a city of millions answers to a voice telling him that his long-lost sister is dead. He must go to the hospital to identify the body and claim his sister's orphaned newborn daughter until she can be adopted the next day.
During the long hot night, the baby sleeps on a bedspread that used to be indigo blue, but has faded to almost white. As the child lies where the man and his sister used to sleep as children, he quietly writes stories for her, telling of his own childhood full of intensity, anguish, and poetry. He doesn't know his place in the world, but with the help of these stories, the baby someday might.
Raj Kamal Jha's ethereal, poetic prose echoes the loneliness of the human condition.

About this title

Review

Raj Kamal Jha's first novel, The Blue Breadspread: A Novel, is a curious, sometimes powerful, work. From the "First Story" to the final "Eight Words", the book is built up meticulously, scene by scene: a man, no longer young, in a house on Main Circular Road, Calcutta, writing to a baby girl sleeping in the next room, waiting for the couple who are coming to take her away. The man's sister, the infant's mother, is dead. Why is he writing? Who is he? What has happened to his sister?: " For years, I have been waiting for news of my sister." The poignancy of her loss and the sudden appearance of her child generate the urge to produce this fable of a family for a child who may never know who she is, where she comes from: "Something you will see or hear will remind you of something missing in your heart, perhaps a hole, the blood rushing through it ... They will then give you these stories." Instead of a family, then, there are stories--the lifeblood of this troubled, and troubling, narrator compelled to deliver the uncomfortable truth of the childhood he has shared with his sister. --Vicky Lebeau

Review

""The Blue Bedspread can be read easily in one sitting. But its images and emotions will linger long after the surprise ending."-USA Today
"A brilliant beginning for a writer whose voice already shows a maturity well beyond his years."-The New York Times
PRAISE FOR "THE BLUE BEDSPREAD"
"Jha is a remarkable writer, both in excess and restraint."-The Sunday Times (London)
"The quiet tone of this debut novel . . . packs a deceptive punch, unflinchingly delineating the familial turbulence raging just below the veneer of daily life."-Entertainment Weekly
""The Blue Bedspread "can be read easily in one sitting. But its images and emotions will linger long after the surprise ending."-USA Today
"A brilliant beginning for a writer whose voice already shows a maturity well beyond his years."-The New York Times

Edition details

• Publisher: Picador
• Publication date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0330392344
• ISBN 13: 9780330392341
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 240