A Suitable Boy - Softcover

SETH VIKRAM

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140230335 ISBN 13: 9780140230338

Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd, 1994

Synopsis

Vikram Seth's novel is, at its core, a love story: the tale of Lata's - and her mother, Mrs Rupa Mehra's - attempts to find a suitable boy for Lata, through love or through exacting maternal appraisal. Set in the early 1950s in an India newly independent and struggling through a time of crisis, A Suitable Boy takes us into the richly imagined world of four large extended families and spins a compulsively readable tale of their lives and loves. A sweeping panoramic portrait of a complex, multiethnic society in flux. A Suitable Boy remains the story of ordinary people caught up in a web of love and ambition, humor and sadness, prejudice and reconciliation, the most delicate social etiquette and the most appalling violence.

About this title

About the Author

Vikram Seth was born in 1952. He trained as an economist and has lived for several years each in England, California, China and India. He is the author of A Suitable Boy, which was an international number one bestseller, An Equal Music and several other novels. He has also written five volumes of poetry including Beastly Tales.

From Kirkus Reviews

Set in newly independent India, Nehru's early 1950's, this adipose saga counterbalances a book of social manners--the marrying off of a well-to-do educated young woman, Lata Mehra--with a historical account (even at the level of transcribed parliamentary debate) of the subcontinent trying to find its societal bearings vis-...-vis language, religion, and the redistribution of estate-lands taken off the hands of the elite. Set mainly in Brahmpur, the story encompasses four well-off families, with a focus mostly on the younger members--poets, academics, playboys, newlyweds--who stitch a pattern of peccadillo through their elders' expectations. Meanwhile, Seth, whose California novel in verse, The Golden Gate (1986), was clever and energetic in concept but dull and soapy in final effect, falls into the same trap here: lots of stuff obviously--at a marathon 1300-plus pages--but characters made out of clich‚, with background-India the very stuffed pillow of local color that keeps them standing. The book, too, fairly squeaks with its own pleasure in itself, larded with poetry and a general recommendation of art over politics and money: the characters it spends the most time over are narcissists. Anyone wanting to read how a marriageable daughter can X-ray a whole society ought to let this cream-puff-wrapped-in-a-cinder-block pass and return to Tanizaki's classic Japanese masterpiece, The Makioka Sisters. Fat (the publishing world's delayed reparation for Rushdie's Satanic Verses?) but fatuous. (First printing of 100,000; Book-of- the-Month Dual Selection for May) -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Edition details

• Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 0140230335
• ISBN 13: 9780140230338
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 1368