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Bookish Quotes
"Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn't."
Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard
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Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard
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This Book is Currently in the Wild!
1 journaler for this copy...
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I've never read anything by Kiran Desai, but this book looks great. An accidental (and hopefully serendipitous) find at Value Village yesterday.
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What a strange sense I'm left with, just having finished this book. I enjoyed reading it very much -- Desai's characters are lively and familiar, her descriptions of food, fabric, smells, and landscapes are intoxicating, her use of language is playful and eminently quotable, and the novel's premise was compelling. And yet, in the moments just after finishing it, I'm not sure the book worked for me. Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard tells the story of Sampath Chawal, a middle-class, twenty-something year old postal worker living in the village of Shahkot in the Himalayan foothills. Sampath is utterly un-ambitious, and he hates his job in the post office. He spends his days distracting himself from work he's perfectly capable of doing by reading other peoples' mail, taking elaborate exception when his boss imposes upon him to assist with a family member's wedding preparations during work hours. Sampath's father's efforts to motivate him fall on deaf ears. One day he seals his fate by behaving so outrageously at his boss's daughter's wedding that he loses his job, and we wonder what exactly is going on. Is Sampath losing his mind? In a kind of inversion of the story of Buddha Gautama, Sampath climbs a guava tree and renounces all further connection with the material world. He likes it up in the tree - it's cool, quiet, and people leave him alone. For a while. Before long, he is recognized in the village as a "baba" -- a guru -- and his family, recognizing an opportunity for pecuniary gain, rally around him. They sell tea, souvenirs and small offerings (sold to pilgrims, then re-sold the next day after they've been left at the foot of Sampath's tree), in exchange for which Sampath hands down messages of great wisdom and insight: "Some fruit must be eaten with the skin" ... "Dab your mouth with honey and you will get plenty of flies" ... "Your answers are beside the question". Midway along, the book seemed to me to be a re-telling of the story of many Spiritual Greats: the more stupidly oblique and open-ended their messages, the more wisdom we credit them with. I looked forward to Desai's take on what Chogyam Trungpa (a tree baba of the first order) once called "spiritual materialism". Then -- somewhat abruptly -- the book took off in several new directions: a roving band of alcoholic monkeys (considerably less engaging than the Cinema Monkey, a simian character introduced in the first half of the novel) threaten Sampath's peaceful existence in the tree, his mother Kulfi becomes increasingly transfixed with her esoteric recipes, and Sampath's sister Pinky inexplicably attacks a young ice cream vendor to whom she seems to be attracted. Things fall apart, the plot line included. Unfortunately, they never came together again for me. I continued to read Hullabaloo because the dialogue continued to entertain and the imagery continued to dazzle. But the ending of this novel was a full-on descent into magical realism which left me stranded and completely let down, as though someone had started to tell a wonderful story then got off the bus before they could finish it. |
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Released 5 yrs ago (1/21/2007 UTC) at Starbucks 6th and Columbia in New Westminster, British Columbia Canada WILD RELEASE NOTES:
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