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A Son of the Circus

A Son of the Circus

List Price: $7.99
Your Price: $7.19
Product Info Reviews

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Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Transsexual Serial Killer, Dwarfs and Monks in Bombay
Review: Like its main character, Dr Farruk Daruwalla, an orthopedist with a weird hobby of sampling dwarf blood with an aim to find a cure against nanism, the story goes on and on through India. Dr. Daruwalla, as always, hesitates whether he should return, even if I, having read the book only recently, don't. Even if the author confesses to not having spent more than one month in India, his work claims to a much more profound insight into the Indian subcontinent. Dr Daruwalla's big secret is his being the author of the screenplays for the movies about John Dhar, a hard-boiled Indian Masala Police Officer. Anyway, both end up trying to catch a possibly transsexual serial killer somewhere around Maharashtra. Immensely rewarding. Thanks, Irving. /Hansi Elsbacher Journalist Sweden hansi.elsbacher@sifo.se

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: What happened?
Review: I also have read all of Irving's books, and usually find each completely satisfying. I loved Garp, Cider House Rules and A Prayer For Owen Meany affected me as deeply as it seems to have many people. Setting Free the Bears has one of the best endings of any book I have read. So once A Son of the Circus was published I could hardly wait to read it! I tried, several times, but I always seemed to lose interest about ten pages in. You know when you find yourself re-reading the same paragraph over and over but you still can't remember what you have just read? That's the trouble I had with this book. After owning it for five years I finally sat myself down one summer and literally forced myself to read the whole thing cover to cover, to at least give it a fair chance. Hoping perhaps it was just had a bad beginning. No such luck. This is one Irving I will not be reading again and again. What happened is all I can ask!! You can imagine my trepidation upon the publishing of A Widow For One Year. However, I read it almost immediately and was overjoyed to find Irving back at his best! The ending of this novel rivals Setting Free the Bears. As you can see, a bad ending REALLY can ruin a book that has been great up until the last page for me. Let's hope that we never slip into the slump of A Son of the Circus again.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: FULL OF ZEST... HUMOR... EMOTION
Review: ITS EXCELLENT READING. This book is one of John Irving's best!! If you loved The World According to Garp, you'll love this book.

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: All The Quirky Style Of Irving With None Of The Substance
Review: It's like Irving's body typed up this appallingly lame load of trash while his soul went on hiatus or something. Read anything else by him, but don't waste your time with this shameful waste of trees.

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: Intellectual garbage
Review: Throughout ones life, we all accumulate garbage as a by product of living. Son of the Circus is John Irvings intellectual garbage. I will forgive him for writing this piece of trash but only because I believe that by throwing out this garbage it will make room for the creative genius of Owen Meany and Garp to reappear. I have love every word he has ever written. After years of waiting Son was a tragic disappointment. My true rating would be a zero but its not an option.

It was a great relief when Widow for One Year was published. It was vindication for my belief that that Irving had not lost the touch.

To prospective readers, don't bother with this superfiscial attempt at literature. He throws everything lewd and disgusting at you as if shock value equaled true value.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Long, but worth it
Review: On a lark and with a few minutes to spare, I picked this book up and started reading. The first 20 pages were etnertaining enough for me to check it out and give it a whirl.

This was a book that tested the limits of "do I not finish what I started?" While entertaining throughout, the first 150 pages or so were annoying in that every story and charecter led to a tangent of another. Get to the point, I wanted to scream.

However, it finally picked up, and 630 pages and 5 weeks later, I completed it. Quite a great book, if you can make the commitment. Not surprisingly, many LOL passage, and plenty of the standard Irving perversity: dildos, sex change operations, dwarfs, explicit murders and graphic sex. It wasn't the John Irving book I was expecting to read next, but I'm not sorry I did.

Now, where is that new Stephen King book, that I can knock off in three sittings?

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: We are who we are.
Review: Irving sets this story outside of his over familiar New England...and thank God! Now, Irving is associated with New Hampshire, Maine, et al., so this change of locale is a very broad variation on the book's themes of our, the human, search for identity and our need to accept ourselves for who we are. The good Dr. Daruwalla draws blood from dwarves in order to find the genetic marker that causes their stunted stature. The doctor's friend and chauffer, Vinod, such a dwarf, doesn't understand why he is making such a fuss and wishes the doctor would cease. The doctor does not. After twenty years his research has produced nothing. Characters and situations riff on the themes of identity, identification with place, nationality, sex, gender, and the blending of real identity with that as portrayed in popular culture. One last closing comment: I love this book, too, because the author chose a universal theme rather than a social concern specific to a time and place. Wonderful literature.

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: Not Irving At His Best
Review: John Irving's 1989 novel "A Prayer For Owen Meany" is perhaps my favorite book of all time so I had hopes for this one, his first full novel since that triumph. But for some reason, Irving chose to write a lurid, trashy "Silence of the Lambs" style murder mystery involving a transsexual-prostitute serial killer and, to make it worse, pads his story out with enough extraneous details to stretch the book out to a ridiculously overlong 633 pages. Saying that this book requires patience on the part of the reader is being kind; it requires endurance. One big problem is that the main character, Dr. Daruwalla, is mostly just an observer and never really develops as a compelling character, probably because he gets lost in the convoluted narrative. To Irving's credit, there are a few interesting characters and subplots scattered throughout but its hardly worth the effort of plowing through this tiresome and at times impenetrable novel to get to them.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: A masterful comic tale of an exotic place
Review: Having read Irving for years, the "Dickensian" style is expected and revered. I have always loved the melodic prose and tangent wanderings I stroll down as Irving spins his tale. It takes a confident writer to uproot his "perspective" (for lack of a better world) and give us a book (or story) that is not from his general life. To take a reader to India and invite us into the travels and experiences as Mr Irving did was a trip I felt like taking, without looking back to see if Owen Meaney or Chipper Dove was carrying our baggage. Some writers lack the courage or imagination to take their readers to places outside of their surroundings, but Mr Irving fearlessly provides the visa.

The book was tremendous: Lavish, intriguing, detailed and very funny.. Don't look for Garp of State O' Maine....Let Dr. Daruwalla engage your soul.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Excellent! Entertaining and hilarious.
Review: I have read all of Irving's books and although Owen Meany is my all time fave, this son of the circus had me laughing wildly all throughout my first and second read. I absolutely love the way his mind works!


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