An Obedient Father - Softcover

Sharma, Akhil

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0393337812 ISBN 13: 9780393337815

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2014

Synopsis

“A powerful debut novel that establishes Sharma as a supreme storyteller.”―Philadelphia Inquirer

Ram Karan, a corrupt official in New Delhi, lives with his widowed daughter and his little granddaughter. Bumbling, sad, ironic, Ram is also a man corroded by a terrible secret. Taking the reader down into a world of feuding families and politics, An Obedient Father is a work of rare sensibilities that presents a character as formulated, funny, and morally ambiguous as any of Dostoevsky’s antiheroes.

About this title

Review:

Readers opening this first novel from Akhil Sharma find themselves face to face with a wildly unappealing main character. Ram Karan is a corrupt civil servant, chubby and self-hating. "I had been Mr. Gupta's moneyman for a little less than a year and was no good." Ram has no illusions about his failings: "My panic in negotiations was so apparent that even people who were eager to bribe me became resentful." Things at home aren't so hot either: Ram's wife has recently died, as has his son-in-law, and so his daughter Anita and granddaughter, Asha, have moved in with him. The first chapter of An Obedient Father is lugubrious and oily and awkward, like its narrator; then suddenly the whole thing breaks wide open. Drunk one night, Ram touches Asha with his penis. Anita walks in, and the family's secret is out all at once, like a just-freed, very angry cat: Ram forced Anita to have sex with him repeatedly when she was 12.

Sharma, a Delhi-born New York investment banker, has written a novel that's satisfyingly ambitious and full of really lovely imagery (tulips, for instance, are "heavy-hearted"). He squares Ram's downfall in the context of the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi. As India descends into political turmoil, Ram is made accountable for corruption both at work and at home. What gives the book its engine is its even-tempered handling of Ram himself: he is always complex, never a moral lesson or a villain. By the time Anita exacts her quietly devilish revenge, we feel neither glee nor pity, just sadness. Sharma doesn't have perfect control of his material--the transitions between personal and political can be abrupt, the tension between father and daughter unravels sloppily. Still, this is a new voice of great subtlety and care. --Claire Dederer

About the Author:

Akhil Sharma is the author of Family Life, a New York Times Best Book of the Year and the winner of the International DUBLIN LiteraryAward and the Folio Prize. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Best American Short Stories, and O. Henry Award Stories. A native of Delhi, he lives in New York City and teaches English at Rutgers University–Newark.

About this edition

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 0393337812
• ISBN 13: 9780393337815
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 288