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The Hero's Walk
 
 
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The Hero's Walk (Paperback)

by Anita Rau Badami (Author)
4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)

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Product details

  • Paperback: 368 pages
  • Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC; New edition edition (2 Sep 2002)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 0747557969
  • ISBN-13: 978-0747557968
  • Product Dimensions: 19.8 x 14 x 2.4 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 313,516 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Product Description

Review

Confident and engaging a wise and affectionate portrait teems with memorable characters and wry cameos' INDEPENDENT


Scotland on Sunday

'A bittersweet tale dealing with the conflict within families and the heartrending effects of death'
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Average Customer Review
4.0 out of 5 stars (2 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars Well-written domestic drama of small-town Indian life., 21 Dec 2002
By Mary Whipple (New England) - See all my reviews
(TOP 10 REVIEWER)   
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

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0 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars Enjoyable read, 21 April 2009
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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