The Silver Castle - Hardcover

James, Clive

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0375500936 ISBN 13: 9780375500930

Publisher: Random House Inc, 1998

Synopsis

Told with Clive James's trademark dry wit, The Silver Castle is a tragicomic morality tale for our time.
In his astonishing odyssey from the gutter to the soundstages and salons of Bollywood, Sanjay meets up with every variant of sinner and would-be savior, and along the way he trades on his "heart-breaking" physical beauty and canny lingual facility to grab at luck wherever it may be had - in the pocket of a tourist, as a guide for the Western news crews who regularly descend on Bombay to update their stock footage of grinding poverty, or in the bed of an older male protector or a past-her-prime cinema princess.
Throughout, Sanjay's spirit is sustained by the movies, and by his first behind-the-scenes glimpse, as a young trespasser on the set of the Silver Castle, of the magical artifice of filmmaking. It is a true vision of an utterly false reality, the source of Sanjay's subsequent triumphs and of his ultimate misfortune. But what happens to Sanjay in the end is not a singular event. As this deeply humane novel convincingly argues, Sanjay's fate is the world's.

About this title

From the Publisher

Tragi-comic story of growing up in Bombay
A brilliant celebration of the Indian film world, this is the tragi-comic story of Sanjay, a Bombay pavement child, who grows up fascinated by Bollywood and its stars and whose lifelong dream is to join them in their silver castle. Sanjay learns to charm and outwit tourists and uses his sex appeal and hard-won ability to speak English to get jobs guiding film crews on the 'poverty trail'. He even manages to become a stunt man and begins a career in films himself, until his world collapses and he loses everything, ending up more or less in the gutter where he started. "Often hilarious and always ironic, this is James's best novel" Independent; "The most gripping, entertaining, funny and moving novel I've read for a long time...a novel which held me, in tears and laughter and back again to tears, throughout its pages" Sunday Telegraph; "There is much to enjoy here, flair, colour, a real feel for the country...We all know about Clive James the great wit. This book confirms the wit has a sensitive heart" Meera Syal, Daily Express; "Extremely affecting...skilful and eloquent. What we care about is Sanjay, his hopeless position and his misery" Mail on Sunday

Edition details

• Publisher: Random House Inc
• Publication date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0375500936
• ISBN 13: 9780375500930
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 263