The Point of Return - Softcover

Deb, Siddhartha

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0330493566 ISBN 13: 9780330493567

Publisher: Pan Macmillan, 2002

Synopsis

Set in the north-eastern hills of India, this is the moving story of a father and a son. Dr. Dam and Babu have lived for years as strangers in the same home, both puzzled and resentful. But as his father weakens and wearies of life, Babu is drawn closer to him. Before long he finds himself embarking on a great journey, an odyssey through the memories of his father, his family and his country.

About this title

About the Author:

Siddhartha Deb was born in India in 1965 and lives in New York. He was a journalist in India for several years before moving to the US where he has taken up writing full time. Point of Return is his first novel. The New Yorker is keen to select him as one of their 'Writers to Watch'.

From Publishers Weekly:

An "inept archeologist of memories" is how Babu, the narrator of Deb's elegiac debut novel, describes himself in this perceptive, if convoluted, tale about a generation gap between father and son in 1970s and '80s India. Babu's narrative unfolds in reverse chronological order as he tries to do justice to his father's life. Dr. Dam, a Hindu veterinary surgeon, has to flee his native Bengal when India is partitioned in 1947. He moves to a northern hill town in the state of Assam and becomes a civil servant, one of the few who is conspicuously upstanding in a corrupt postpartition bureaucracy where bribery and thievery reign. By the time Babu is born in 1970, Dr. Dam, now aged 44, has changed. He still has his old-fashioned rectitude (which Babu finds embarrassing) and Nehru-inspired ideals of national unity (which seem increasingly irrelevant as sectarian violence blooms), but he refuses to challenge the ineptitude around him. To Babu, Dr. Dam's servility in dealing with high-ranking, unrefined superiors smacks of a colonial mentality, remnants of his youth under the Raj. Babu learns much later about a long-ago pivotal incident in which his father felt duty-bound to reveal graft and paid a terrible price. Deb draws a sharp, memorable picture of the misunderstandings between father and son, exacerbated by rapid changes in India's political and cultural landscape. The structure of the narrative sometimes makes it hard to understand the chronology of events, but Deb convincingly shows how Babu comes to admire and mourn his father, and movingly dramatizes the immersion of individual lives in the flow of history.
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About this edition

• Publisher: Pan Macmillan
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0330493566
• ISBN 13: 9780330493567
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 227