Author: Upamanyu Chatterjee
Publisher: Hamish Hamilton/Penguin
Year: 2010
Language: English
Pages: 361
ISBN/UPC (if available): 9780670083527
Description
For not having loved one’s dead father enough, could one make amends by loving one’s child more?
Eighty-five and half paralysed, Shyamanand is on his deathbed when he goes missing. His apparent refusal to meet death in the expected way—calm and accepting and lying down—is a cause for great anguish to his son Jamun, who leads a life of quiet desperation, trying to balance feelings of despair and resignation since the suicide of his friend and neighbour Dr Mukherjee.
After their father disappears, Jamun and his brother Burfi reconnect in their old home that builder Lobhesh Monga has his eyes on. In their quest to find out what happened to Shyamanand, they find a path out of desolation, even as TV executive Kasturi, Jamun’s former lover and mother of his only child, is busy recycling the more melodramatic moments of Jamun’s life for the blockbuster Hindi soap Cheers Zindagi.
In powerful, austere prose shot through with black humour, Upamanyu Chatterjee has produced an intensely moving examination of family ties and the redemptive power of love, however imperfect, in the midst of death and degeneration.
COMMENTS:
‘Chatterjee is a mercilessly gifted observer’ —Firdaus Kanga, The Independent
English August
‘There’s a popular conception that Indian fiction in English hit the road to big time with Upamanyu Chatterjee’s English, August in 1988. The irreverent language, the wry humour and the immediately identifiable situations struck a chord with a generation of Indians which was looking for its own voice and found it in Agastya Sen.’
--- The Sunday Express
‘[English, August is] the “Indianest” Novel in English that I know of utterly uncompromised, wildly funny, and a revelation of everyday life in modern India.’
--- Suketu Mehta
The Last Burden
‘The Last Burden is one of the most honest novels of Chatterjee’s generation.’
--- The Hindu
‘Remarkable, self-doubting and humane…. A nightmare shot through with tenderness.’
--- The Literary Supplement
The Mammaries of the Welfare State
‘A Searing passage though bureaucratic India …a book of laughter and disgust, a four-letter rejoinder to the grotesquery of governance.’
--- India Today
‘A great comic fable of our times.’
--- Hindustan Times
Weight Loss
‘The grotesquery of the sexual and the spiritual pervades the pages of Weight Loss…An unrepentant pornographer’s bumpy road to salvation is a delight.’
--- India Today
‘Audaciously inventive, hilarious, poignant and immensely disquieting, you could not have asked more of it.’
--- Hindustan Times
Contents
Part One
1. Missing Person
2. Death Just four Blocks Away Now
3. A Topic to Bond Together Father and Son
4. Third Eye, Third Son
5. Sign the House, Sign My Life, Away
6. Dr Mukherjee Answers a Vexed Question
7. Helpless
8. For Not Having Loves One’s dead Father Enough
9. In Heaven without Knowing It
10. Done, it is Done
Part Two
11. Missing Person
12. Topics to bond together two Brothers
13. Helpless
14. Making Amends
15. The Bank Manager Parries A Vexed Question
16. Third Eye on third Son
17. Hazily Sensing Heaven
18. Death at his very Doorstep
19. Sell the House, buy a Life
20. A Deed Almost Done
Part Three
21. Missing Person
22. All the While at Home
23. Sell the House, Save Your Life
24. Fathers Biological and Absent Love their Children More
25. Third Son Shuts Third Eye
26. Naina Helps Burfi Answer A Vexed Question
27. Not that Helpless
28. Doing the Deed
29. A Topic to bond Together fathers and Sons
30. To Heaven and Back