- Paperback: 240 pages
- Publisher: Picador (19 July 2002)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0330493566
- ISBN-13: 978-0330493567
- Product Dimensions: 21 x 13.4 x 2.2 cm
- Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 935,709 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Review
"Movingly dramatizes the immersion of individual lives in the flow of history." -- Publishers Weekly
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Product Description
A moving story of a young man's relationship with his father and with India's past This is the story of a father and son, Dr Dam and Babu. The father crossed to India from Bangladesh at Partition. He knew nothing of the world he and his family had been catapulted into, but he made his way as best he could, always sticking to his principles and being guided by his morals. For this he earned himself a reputation as a strange and rather unlucky man, but he also gained the respect of many colleagues and acquaintances. As his father weakens and wearies of life, Babu, his son, begins to learn and understand a little better all that his father has gone through. He begins to retrace Dr Dam's long journey from childhood right up to his experiences in the present, including his endless fight with the bureaucratic corruption and indifference that surrounded him in his work. In this way Babu starts to pull together both his own family's life and the turbulence of the years that followed Partition. Deb writes in the most moving and delicate way about the hidden stories of India. He has an eye for the most delicious and insightful details of everday life, and the warmth and talent to tell a story both from the personal and from the historical perspective with great success.
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First Sentence
Through the small opening in the grimy pane that separated clerk and pensioner, an impasse had been reached over the responsibilities of the minister in charge of the veterinary department. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Back Cover
Through the small opening in the grimy pane that separated clerk and pensioner, an impasse had been reached over the responsibilities of the minister in charge of the veterinary department. Read the first page
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
In this sensitively imagined and astutely observed novel, Babu, son of veterinarian Dr. Dam, reminisces about his father’s life, trying to understand him--at least to the extent that sons can ever understand their fathers. Acutely aware that every generation views events and experiences through knowledge gained during own lifetimes, Babu recognizes that though he and his father have shared many events, their views of these events are vastly different, in each case conditioned by their quite separate, though sometimes intersecting, pasts.
The Dam family is Bengali, managing to escape the 1979 civil war there by fleeing to Assam, a remote, northeastern province of India nestled between Bangladesh and Bhutan. Supporting his elderly parents and several brothers and sisters, and marrying and starting a family late in life, Dr. Dam has spent his career as an honest civil servant within the corrupt Indian government. Babu, born in India, has never known the places which shaped the lives of his father and grandparents and which still live in their hearts. Separated by both temperament and by dissimilar backgrounds, Dr. Dam and Babu are remote from each other until they are brought together dramatically through Dr. Dam’s debilitating stroke.
Deb’s straightforward and often elegant prose is particularly effective for its subtlety. Lacking the lush description so frequently found in novels with Indian settings, the novel concentrates instead on universal values and the father-son search for understanding. The novel is less exotic, despite its unusual setting, than some other Indian novels, but more accessible to readers from other cultures and more potent in its observations about life. In an ironic twist, the author uses his clear, unadorned prose to provide Dr. Dam’s personal history in a chronology which, though linear, moves backward in time, as Babu, aged seventeen, recalls what he knows of his father and the events and people which have influenced him.
The reverse chronology is much like the history we all create for our parents whenever we try to mine our own experiences for insights into their lives in an effort to find common ground and understand who we think they are. We recall the past events in their lives which we think are important based on our own experiences, not theirs. With its focus both on a man coming to terms with his father’s life, and on everyone’s yearning for a homeland, even after it is gone, Deb provides observations which expand our own view of what forms our characters, and gives us new insights into universal truths. Mary Whipple
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
6 reviews
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful
"Memory is about what you decide to remember."
22 May 2003
Format:Hardcover
In this sensitively imagined and astutely observed novel, Babu, son of veterinarian Dr. Dam, reminisces about his father's life, trying to understand him--at least to the extent that sons can ever understand their fathers. Acutely aware that every generation views events and experiences through knowledge gained during own lifetimes, Babu recognizes that though he and his father have shared many events, their views of these events are vastly different, in each case conditioned by their separate, though sometimes intersecting, pasts.
The Dam family is Bengali, managing to escape the 1979 civil war there by fleeing to Assam, a remote, northeastern province of India nestled between Bangladesh and Bhutan. Supporting his elderly parents and several brothers and sisters, and marrying and starting a family late in life, Dr. Dam has spent his career as an honest civil servant within a corrupt Indian government. Babu, born in India, has never known the places which shaped the lives of his father and grandparents and which still live in their hearts. Separated by both temperament and by dissimilar backgrounds, Dr. Dam and Babu are remote from each other until they are brought together dramatically through Dr. Dam's debilitating stroke.
Deb's straightforward and often elegant prose is particularly effective for its subtlety. Lacking the lush description so frequently found in novels with Indian settings, the novel concentrates instead on universal values and the father-son search for understanding. The novel is less exotic, despite its unusual setting, than some other Indian novels, but more accessible to readers from other cultures and more potent in its observations about life. In an ironic twist, the author uses his clear, unadorned prose to provide Dr. Dam's personal history in a chronology which, though linear, moves backward in time, as Babu, aged seventeen, recalls what he knows of his father and the events and people which have influenced him.
The reverse chronology is much like the history we all create for our parents whenever we try to mine our own experiences for insights into their lives in an effort to find common ground and understand who we think they are. We recall past events in their lives which we think are important based on our own experiences, not theirs. With its focus both on a man coming to terms with his father's life, and on everyone's yearning for a homeland, even after it is gone, Deb provides observations which expand our own view of what forms our characters, and gives us new insights into universal truths. Mary Whipple
5 of 6 people found the following review helpful
Moving
3 Jun 2003
Format:Hardcover
With its fractured timeline and foreign (even for Indians) Indian states, this book will swirl around you. Yield to it. Enjoy it. Be disturbed by it. Draw parallels with your own life (especially if you no longer live where you did as a child). And more often than not, be transported.
This book moves you through geography, through time, through life. And it is a journey that you will be glad that you took.
While I eagerly await Mr. Deb's next book, I am troubled by the idea that he might never write another book that is so true, and so felt. Regardless, don't let this one pass you by.
4 of 5 people found the following review helpful
Consult a map & read it twice!
10 Jun 2003
Format:Hardcover
This is no light or easy read; the chronology and narrative perspective of this book change, and the shifts are sometimes unsettling. This I took to be part of the author's design, and by the end of the book I found it effective, a part of the chaos of memory that speaks true. I also found myself wishing the overleaf of the book had a map of the regions, as place is so important in the novel and I was unfamiliar with more than basic Indian geography. I would recommend that a reader unfamiliar with these regions print out a map (and also note what the country looked like in the days before Partition) before beginning on this literary journey. It's a journey I'm glad to have made, and although I have not yet undertaken a second read, that was my first impulse when I came to the end -- I felt there was so much more for me to mine from the intertwined stories of Babu's and Dr. Dam's lives as shared by Deb than I had been able to absorb in one pass. A good writer writes what he knows and speaks the truth -- much easier said than done -- and Deb has done both quite beautifully in this book.
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