Nirip on the cusp of fifty is not happy with his life. His father is an ogre and his mother a witch. He is not happy with that either. His sort of half-sister is a sort of half-man. A really close relative turns out to be a serial killer. He is not happy sleeping with his chauffeur's wife. Neither is she. Then, for his amusement, his father arranges a cricket match between rival dacoit teams in which some of the players are shot dead. Who could be happy in such circumstances? Days before his fiftieth birthday, with Nirip still wondering whether he should go ahead and have himself kidnapped so that he can make some money, he discovers, most unexpectedly, that he is not the biological child of his parents. Witty, macabre, sad, cruel, unforgivingly insightful, Fairy Tales at Fifty is part adventure tale, part nightmare, part acid trip-and throughout a triumph of fiction.
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Upamanyu Chatterjee was born in 1959. He joined the Indian Administrative Service in 1983. His published works include short stories and the novels English, August: An Indian Story (1988), The Last Burden (1993), The Mammaries of the Welfare State (2000), which won the Sahitya Akademi Award for writing in English, Weight Loss (2006) and Way to Go (2011), which was shortlisted for the Hindu Best Fiction Award. In 2008, he was awarded the Order of Officier des Arts et des Lettres by the French Government for his contribution to literature.
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Hardcover. Condition: New. Dust Jacket Condition: New. 1st Edition. On the cusp of fifty, Nirip learns, quite by accident, that he is not the biological child of his parents. He is more intrigued than shocked by the discovery, for his family history has persistently revealed to him that ordinary lives in this bloody rotten world have all the qualities of myth, of adventure, folk and fairy tale; they appear ordinary only because one wills oneself to view them as so. The world saw Nirip's father Pashupati for example as a captain of industry and the creator of a business empire, but to his family he'd always been the insatiably lustful ogre of fairy tale, ever on the lookout for females and babies to glut his appetite with. Nirip arranges to have himself kidnapped and then plays night cricket with his dacoit captors because no family member appears keen to pay the ransom and have him back. Witty, macabre, heroic, cruel, unforgivingly insightful, Fairy Tales at Fifty is a triumph of fiction and only in part because it asserts that in fiction alone are human lives seen as precious. Seller Inventory # 114192
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