Playing The Game - Hardcover

Buruma, Ian

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0224027581 ISBN 13: 9780224027588

Publisher: Random House UK, 1991

Synopsis

Buruma's prismatic, fascinating first novel is a portrait of Ranji, the cricket player who was "not simply the greatest cricketer of all time, but a fairy tale prince . . . so famous that children sang songs about him, and grown men wept when they saw him play." Buruma weaves the adventures of an unnamed narrator together with a (fictional) undiscovered memoir of Ranji to create a witty and reverbatory meditation on England, India and the post-colonial sense of self.

About this title

From Kirkus Reviews

A first novel from Buruma (Behind the Mask, 1984; God's Dust, 1989)--superficially about that most British of games, cricket, and one of its legendary players, but also a somewhat self-conscious and awkward meditation on nationality and cultural identity. The narrator, like Buruma, was born and educated in Holland and is a journalist specializing in East Asia. In India on assignment, he finds himself increasingly drawn to investigating the life of the great Indian cricketer K.S. Ranjitsinhji, the Jam Saheb of Nawanagar, who played for Cambridge and England at the turn of the century. By all accounts, ``Ranji'' was an exceptional man: of royal blood, he was a favorite of the fans, generous to his friends, a player of both natural and practiced accomplishment, and accepted in England's highest society at the time when racial prejudice and snobbery about other cultures were rampant. These broad details of Ranji's life are revealed in an obvious and artificial way in letters conveniently discovered by the narrator and allegedly written by Ranji to his old friend and teammate C.B. Fry. Equally awkward are the interludes between the letters--where the narrator relates his interviews with those in India who knew Ranji, and his discussions with an opinionated young man, Inder, who was educated in England. In these discussions, Ranji is both the measure of the possibilities of cultural assimilation and of its limits. Ranji, the prince who believed in the Empire, was in fact betrayed in his last years when the British, responding to Indian nationalists, began paring the power of the princes. He died a sad and disappointed man, out of step with his times and his place. Intelligent and thoughtful, but the ideas and questions raised don't really sit well with the story of the shadowy and elusive cricketer. An ambitious but disappointing debut. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

From Publishers Weekly

Journalist and nonfiction author Buruma ( Meridian ; God's Dust ) has written often and eloquently of the odd intersections of East and West in Asia. Recently he has evinced interest in the peculiarities of class in England, his adopted home. In his first novel he examines the convergence of these two subjects through a thinly fictionalized biography of cricketer Ranjitsinhji, a transplanted Indian who starred for English teams during the Edwarian period, "an English folk hero" who finds himself "depicted on such articles as matchboxes and chocolate wrappers." Alternating between his own search for Ranji's past and lengthy extracts from an autobiographical letter by the athlete to cricketer and classics scholar C. B. Fry, Buruma gradually unveils Ranji's own sense of deracination, his class snobberies and, finally, his presentiment of betrayal by the historical forces that will ultimately free India from colonial rule. Rather than a conventional narrative, however, this most resembles a series of essays on dandyism, the class-race nexus in the Anglo-Indian experience and the nature of Englishness. Unfortunately, Buruma's observations lie inertly on the page.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Random House UK
• Publication date: 1991
• ISBN 10: 0224027581
• ISBN 13: 9780224027588
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 234