- Unknown Binding
- Publisher: Little, Brown (1907)
- Language English
- ASIN: B00089FGES
- Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
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First Sentence
IT WAS ONLY FIVE O'CLOCK on a July morning in Toturpuram, and already every trace of night had disappeared. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt | Back Cover
IT WAS ONLY FIVE O'CLOCK on a July morning in Toturpuram, and already every trace of night had disappeared. Read the first page
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Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt | Back Cover
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
12 of 13 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
The paralyzing heat at 5:00 a.m. on a July morning in Toturpuram, on the southeast coast of India, is depicted in intense, sensual imagery from the opening of the novel and becomes a metaphor for the lives of the Rao family. Three generations living together in a large and decaying house which they cannot afford to maintain, the Raos constantly carp at each other and seethe with long-standing resentments, the emotional temperature rising in concert with the heat, which "[hangs] over the town in long, wet sheets."
Author Badami carefully selects her details to reveal both the realities of her characters' lives and the emotional climate they inhabit. The grande dame and grandmother of the family, Ammayya, is a slightly senile, mean-spirited, and caste-conscious woman, who controls her son Sripathi, her daughter Putti, and her long suffering daughter-in-law Nirmala. With unusual and homely similes and metaphors, Badami establishes the tone. Nirmala is "like a bar of Lifebuoy soap, functional but devoid of all imagination." Nirmala and Sripathi are "like a pair of bullock yoked together, endlessly turning the water wheel round and round, eyes bent to the earth." The cloudy sky is "curdled milk."
Romance is the heart of the action. The problems in the marriage of Ammayya and her husband, and of Sripathi and Nirmala are described in detail. By contrast, Sripathi's daughter Maya has happily married an American and lives in the U.S, but she has been banished from Sripathi's life for defying his wishes. When Maya and her husband Alan are killed in an accident, leaving an 8-year-old daughter the Raos have never met, they bring this silent and traumatized orphan to India and into their uncertain lives.
Predictably, the family learns from each other and begins to communicate, but the events which bring about these changes are either telegraphed early in the book (the fate of Putti, Sripathi's sister, for example) or result from external chance and not from their own actions. Additionally, the responses of the child to her strange, new environment do not ring true. Already traumatized and silent, this fragile child faces additional traumas after her arrival in Toturpuram, including some very dramatic ones at the end of the book, yet she seems to suffer no ill effects. Badami tells us the book is about "the chanciness of existence, the beauty and the hope and the loss that always accompanies life," themes she has abundantly illustrated, but the warm and fuzzy ending owes more to chance than what we or the characters would expect. Mary Whipple
Format:Paperback
This is a wonderful story which deserves to be widely read. Sripathi has disowned his daughter when she moved to Canada and married a European. Even when she has a child, he refuses to acknowledge her or his new grand-daughter. Tragedy strikes - his daughter and son-in-law are killed in a car crash and he travels to Canada to bring his traumatised and grieving grand-daughter back to his home in India.
This is how the story of how she starts to recover while at the same time Sripathi gradually becomes a more tolerant and loving person. His household, containing a wife, terrible old mother-in-law, sad, unmarried sister and radical son, all living in the decaying family home, is beautifully brought to life in this vibrant story.
Not just a well-written and compulsive read, The Hero's Walk also deals with a lot of themes such as status, religion, the power of money, the idealism of youth and the complexity of family relationships.
Fabulous.
This is how the story of how she starts to recover while at the same time Sripathi gradually becomes a more tolerant and loving person. His household, containing a wife, terrible old mother-in-law, sad, unmarried sister and radical son, all living in the decaying family home, is beautifully brought to life in this vibrant story.
Not just a well-written and compulsive read, The Hero's Walk also deals with a lot of themes such as status, religion, the power of money, the idealism of youth and the complexity of family relationships.
Fabulous.
0 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
I found this book highly readable and very enjoyable: most of the characters are likeable and there is a nice element of humour to it.
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