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The Impressionist

The Impressionist

List Price: $39.95
Your Price: $39.95
Product Info Reviews

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Rating: 4 stars
Summary: An interestingly woven tale of change in the life of a man
Review: I bought this book at first for its storyline based in turn of the century India...On that basis, I was very happy with the author's descriptions of colonial life, and that of the half-Indian/half-Anglo people as well. Description of court life of the Raj under the thumb of the English was excellent. However, I was very suprised with the actual storyline: from boyhood privilege to life as a virtual outcast; and how the boy takes hold of his situation and capitalizes on an opportunity to completely remake himself in the image of an Englishman.
Once the boy is able to assume life as a proper Englishman, he finds that what he longs for he can no longer obtain, based on who he has now become! Interesting twists in the storyline kept me engrossed in the book...the ending does take some curious turns, but I for one enjoyed it. Would definitely recommend the book to others.

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: Utterly average
Review: I can see why Kunzru received a lot of praise for this book. For a 1st-time author it is indeed a unique and well-presented story. The writing style is definately fine and the historical background to the story is inserted into the overall plot very nicely. There were also some very witty and funny lines throughout the novel....some I won't soon forget.

However, this book starts out great but then fizzles out quickly after the main character leaves the East and comes to England. Some of the passages describing Pran's life at Oxford & England were so boring and so free of dramatic elements that I considered not finishing the book. All the time he spends chasing that dreary bimbo around! At the end, it only served to subtract from the great sense of personal & historic conflict that was brought out in the first half of the novel.

If any of you have forgotten what its like to read a book that starts out great and then bogs down into boredom, I can remind you: You quickly forget about the exciting beginning and set your sights on getting thru to the finish. In the end your left with a book that, while not bad at all, is easy to move on from and forget about.

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: whent down hill
Review: i liked the begin and the interesting premuse in the book, the ature showed potental to paint vivied pictures in ones mind, though is lacking in the showning all sides of the charaters at ones is stead of spreeding them over a life time. the book jumped in its position of relating to reality, which could work but somehow by the end just wasn't there.
it isn't a book i've passed on to others to read.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Extremely interesting story
Review: I really enjoyed this, my first novel by Kunzru, about a young Anglo-Indian boy growing up in a very skin color-conscious British India. When he is kicked out of his uncle's house for his origins, Pran wanders the street and ends up in a variety of situations that take him across the globe.

The writing style was a bit overly-descriptive and enigmatic for my tastes, but Hari Kunzru is absolutely a gifted writer. He has a real talent for poetic prose, and I would be interested in reading some of his Wired articles and anything he wrote as a travel writer. I recommend this book to anyone that enjoys good writing and a tale that could easily be based on reality. The story reminds me of that of Queenie, Michael Korda's retelling of his great-grandmother's experiences in India and abroad as an Anglo-Indian passing herself off as white.

I saw some complaints about the ending, but I felt it was appropriate to the story, although it might not have been decisive enough for many readers. This was a very interesting book - I'm glad I read it.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Extremely interesting story
Review: I really enjoyed this, my first novel by Kunzru, about a young Anglo-Indian boy growing up in a very skin color-conscious British India. When he is kicked out of his uncle's house for his origins, Pran wanders the street and ends up in a variety of situations that take him across the globe.

The writing style was a bit overly-descriptive and enigmatic for my tastes, but Hari Kunzru is absolutely a gifted writer. He has a real talent for poetic prose, and I would be interested in reading some of his Wired articles and anything he wrote as a travel writer. I recommend this book to anyone that enjoys good writing and a tale that could easily be based on reality. The story reminds me of that of Queenie, Michael Korda's retelling of his great-grandmother's experiences in India and abroad as an Anglo-Indian passing herself off as white.

I saw some complaints about the ending, but I felt it was appropriate to the story, although it might not have been decisive enough for many readers. This was a very interesting book - I'm glad I read it.

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: Something important is missing
Review: I tried very hard to find something redeeming in this book, a reason to continue reading. Finally, I thought I had, but it was only a spider crawling across the page. I could not finish this book. The character development was well done for finding the evil within. However, there was no balance in the characters, no one who steps outside of their own needs and desires. Accepting that there are many persons who surpress any twinges of conscience which gives rise to the discomfort of doing evil for completely hedonistic reasons, there was no balance of those persons who had any but the most selfish motivations. Perhaps I may have found such a character, but after half a book it seemed unlikely.

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: A poorly presented book by an author with probably a good de
Review: I was just blown away by the amount of hype associated with this book, the huge advance and the favorable reviews. I looked forward to reading it but I was sorely disappointed, not in the content, which could be intriguing, but in the presentation. The use of present tense throughout the book was alienating to me and detracted from the drama of the story. I felt like abandoning my effort many times but decided to persevere in the hope that things would improve. The section in England when Pran becomes a public school boy, goes to Oxford, falls for Alstare Chapel showed some promise but things became quickly boring again. I was most disturbed by the author's inability to paint Pran's character convincingly. The book seems like three plus books to me. Any comparison with V.S. Naipul, a supremely confident and skillful novelist is particularly odious. The Impressionist is an amateurishand pretentious book by an author of potential. For me it was extremely disappointing.
Paul Svendsen

...

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: If There's No Pran Nath, There's No Book
Review: If there was ever a book I wanted to like, and tried so hard to like, it was Hari Kunzru's THE IMPRESSIONIST. The premise sounded so engaging and so entertaining and so, well, fresh. And, parts of THE IMPRESSIONIST are engaging, entertaining and original, but other parts are so lackluster it actually became a chore to finish the book. Uneven writing is one of this book's faults, but it is not its biggest fault.

The book starts out wonderfully. In India, in 1903, nineteen-year-old Amrita is being borne by porters to an arranged marriage ceremony she wants no part of. To numb her pain (she really wants to kill herself), she's downing opium tablets. Close by, Ronald Forrester, an officer with the British government, is roaming the countryside. As fate would have it, a terrible storm ensues and Forrester is literally swept into the cave where Amrita has taken shelter. Although Amrita doesn't want to go to her wedding, she obviously has no objection to a little (okay, a lot) of pre-marital dallying with Forrester. In fact, she dallies with Forrester until the flood sweeps him out of the cave and out of her life. It is at this point (page 13 in my copy of the book), that THE IMPRESSIONIST stops being good and turns into something dry and cliched and stilted, instead. The wonderful premise is still there, but Kunzru's writing is, for the most part, bad, his dialogue is trite and his characterization almost nonexistent.

Amrita does make it to her wedding but she's dispensed with very quickly, dying in childbirth nine months (but only a few paragraphs) later. Her husband believes the baby is his (in reality, he's Forrester's) and names him Pran Nath.

Flash forward fifteen years. Things must have been going along very well for Pran Nath and his wealthy father (who lives down the block from the Taj Mahal), because Pran Nath is both very spoiled and very rich. He's not loved unconditionally, however, because when his father discovers Pran Nath's true paternity, he's tossed out of the house, penniless, and left to fend for himself. This is where Pran Nath's odyssey as "the impressionist" begins and where Kunzru begins using him as a metaphor for colonial India. As I said, it's a brilliant and original premise but one that leaves so much to be desired in its execution. That's not to say the plot isn't ambitious; it is. In fact, it's so ambitious and original you wonder how on earth it can be so lackluster as well.

Pran Nath quickly finds refuge in an Agra brothel where, because of his "pretty" looks, he becomes "Rukhsana." When he's sold to the nawab of Fatehpur and given to a depraved British major, Major Privett-Clampe, he becomes "Clive," the very essence of a dutiful English schoolboy.

"Clive," however, dislikes his life and, at the first chance, he escapes to Bombay where he's adopted by a Scottish missionary couple, the Macfarlanes. Pran Nath is "Robert" to Mr. and Mrs. Macfarlane, but when he can, he escapes to Bombay's huge "red light" district to work as the pimp, "Pretty Bobby."

The Indian political scene, however, has never been stable and Pran Nath soon finds himself on a ship bound for England in the company of an orphan named Jonathan Bridgeman. Bridgeman, of course, doesn't survive the voyage and it's Pran Nath who takes his place, and his name, at Oxford, where, coincidentally, he comes face to face with his birth father...sort of.

THE IMPRESSIONIST concludes in Africa, where "Jonathan" has gone to study the Fotse tribe (don't miss the allusion to the London stock exchange).

The plot of THE IMPRESSIONIST is sprawling, ambitious and original. It's also, unfortunately, almost colorless. (To create such a colorless plot from such rich material must have been a great feat in and of itself.) Not all the writing is bad, however. There are flashes of pure brilliance in this novel but they're so few and so far between I couldn't decide whether to be encouraged by the flashes of brilliance or discouraged by the vast stretches of barrenness.

The worst part of the whole book is that Pran Nath, himself, has absolutely no character. Yes, I know he's reinventing himself at every twist and turn and I know he's a metaphor for colonial India, but come on, he lived the first fifteen years of his life as Pran Nath. Surely, he must have some personality of his own. Kunzru has obviously forgotten the first maxim of the storyteller...make us care. I wanted so much to care about Pran Nath (and this book), but I couldn't because there is no Pran Nath. He's not just thinly-drawn, he's nonexistent. (I really can't buy into the fact that Kunzru is trying to tell us that unless India is colonized, there is no India.)

The lack of characterization of Pran Nath is, by far, this book's biggest fault although, as I've already said (more than once), it's not the only fault.

While I really can't recommend THE IMPRESSIONIST, I am, for some reason I can't figure out, interested in seeing what Kunzru will come up with next. Whether or not I read it, is still up in the air for me.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Connecting Nothing with Nothing
Review: If you cut a shape out of a folded piece of paper, and then you threw the shape you cut away, you'd still be able to work out what shape you cut because you'd have the piece of paper you used to cut the shape. Am I right? You follow me? But what about if - somehow - you could cut a shape out of the air and fashion a man from the air that you cut? The man will have no substance, you won't be able to make him out, he'll be all air, and - what's worse - the context won't help you either, because the context is as insubstantial as the man you made.

That's The Impressionist to a tee. This is a book about a man without an identity, a man who spends his entire life attempting to fit in (which is, in some respects, what assimilation is all about, and it could be argued that here is a book that aims to depict the life of the migrant, the life of a kind of migrant). The fruit of a flooded love, Pran Nath is raised by the man who believes himself to be his father until said father learns otherwise and casts (at this point pretty spoilt) young Pran out into the street. From here on in, Pran attempts to live what the narrator calls "the unexamined life" (a life diametrically opposed to that which Socrates said was essential). From here on in, Pran (or rather not-Pran, everything-but-Pran, not that Pran was a firm bedrock on which to grow - everything shifts here, this Rushdie world is built on sand) adopts the faces and shapes and tics and mannerisms of wherever his flighty feet take him (Bombay, Norfolk, Oxford, Paris, Africa), the tragedy of his attempt to assimilate (his attempts to portray himself as whiter than white) the very thing that in the end rob him of that which he most desires.

Standing guard in Africa towards the very end of this fine, long novel, Jonathan (as he is by now known) finds that "By the time his two-hour stint is over, his boundaries have dissolved altogether and he is lost, or perhaps not so much lost as dispersed through the darkness, his turning world bereft of still points, radically uncertain about who or where or why he is, or even whether he has the right to call himself a he at all." Kunzru's novel is a kind of wasteland (or Wasteland, if you'd rather), a grand attempt to connect nothing with nothing that ends (curiously enough) when that desire to belong evaporates and this curious man-cut-from-the-air we have followed over however many hundreds of pages disappears in the heat haze of another desert (the desire to belong being that thing which unified the chimera we observed, and - with desire gone - nothing much remains but a Beckettian walking-thing, a thing that walks out of the end of the book and from our sight).

Whilst it may be that marketing The Impressionist as this year's White Teeth was not the smartest thing in the world (this is not as accessible as White Teeth - which isn't to say that this is a difficult book and more to say that this book is slightly harder to quantify), it may be that Kunzru contains within him powers that yet elude Zadie Smith (only The Autograph Man will lay that particular puzzle to rest). Either way, it's a case, again, of not letting the hype put you off a good, solid and promising debut novel.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Morphing into identity...
Review: In a tale that winds through the exotic world of Post WWI India to the sacred halls of English education, a young man, who starts his life as Pran, begins the challenge of adaptation, chameleon-like, in a quest for survival. There is a hint of the spoiled, self-centered individual Pran is, before his rude awakening. When Pran's true half-Anglo parentage is revealed, the formerly princely boy is tossed into the maw of the city, quickly devoured by human predators. Vulnerable in his unusual beauty, Pran has no experience in the art of self-protection and soon falls victim. Absorbed into a low class brothel, he is sexually abused and beaten daily, drugged into a stupor that melts one day into another.

Purchased for the harem of the Nawab of Fatepur, Pran becomes an unfortunate pawn in a power struggle for the fate of Fatepur in the hands of British colonial rule. Pran/Rukhsama enters the palace disguised as a female, ultimately residing with the court hijras (eunuchs) who intend to offer him as Clive, an English schoolboy, in an absurd attempt to blackmail a British officer. In a mix of nefarious plots and idiosyncratic dignitaries, Rukhsana/Clive escapes and is taken in by Scottish missionaries. There, as Chandra/Pretty Bobby, the young man molds himself to fit his surroundings, changing personalities to accommodate a variety of situations. He is adept at mirroring those around him, stepping in and out as necessary. Political tensions increase as British rule prepares to collapse. In a last daring sleight-of-identity, Chandra/Bobby becomes a young English student bound for Oxford, England, when the real boy is murdered at the hands of a hysterical mob.

In taking on the persona of Johnathan Bridgeman, the protagonist seems to accomplish the impossible, the privileged life of an English gentleman of reasonable income, with a promising future. After years of posing, adjusting and adapting, Johnathan falls prey to the unexpected: he falls in love. The object of his sophomoric pining is a young woman who toys with men's attentions, simply because it pleases her. Unfortunately for Johnathan, he has no ability to contend with this situation, and cannot fasten upon a personality that will win her sustained attentions. Desperate, he forges an interest in anthropology in order to remain close to her professor father. Joining the professor on his African expedition to study a remaining tribe of "unspoiled" natives, Johnathan is swept from the safe shores of England back to the bowels of the darkest continent, where he comes face to face with the knowledge that he has himself become a cipher. As the jungle swallows the English expedition, the young man finally releases himself from any expectations, cloaked in anonymity, and learns to live the journey, rather than the destination.

The writing flows from one bizarre incarnation to another, each peppered with absurdity. The protagonist leaps from one identity to the next, honing his skills, his nascent ability to impersonate. Reading the novel, it is tempting to pass over the great sadness that permeates every phase of Pran's life. He has virtually no identity, not Pran, nor Rukhsana, Clive, Chandra/Pretty Bobby or Johnathan. Becoming everyman, he is no man, until he ceases his flight, where nothing from the past is worth keeping. While the language is fluid and well-paced, the author's feat is impressive, his ingenuity stunning in its realization.


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