In Beautiful Disguises - Hardcover

Rajeev Balasubramanyan

3.32

184 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0747547025 ISBN 13: 9780747547020

Publisher: Bloomsbury, 2000

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The story of an Indian girl who imagines herself in Audrey Hepburn movies. Life outside her fantasies is harsh. Her father is an alcoholic, who beats his all-suffering wife, and her lazy brother has given up work. Our heroine's inner world begins to crumble when a marriage is arranged for her.

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About the Author:

Rajeev Balasubramanyam was born in 1973 in England, graduated from Oxford and Cambridge Universities and lives in London. In Beautiful Disguises won a Betty Trask Prize, a prestigious British prize awarded by the Society of Authors in 1999.

From Publishers Weekly:

The unnamed narrator of this promising debut is in many respects a typical teenager--self-obsessed and critical of her elders, projecting a mixture of disdain, irreverence and na‹vet‚. She's a romantic dreamer, convinced that fate will miraculously make her a movie star, although she has never acted and lives in a small village in India. Meanwhile, she views her own life as through a movie lens, comparing herself to Audrey Hepburn as Holly Golightly. But when her father, an alcoholic bully, insists she enter into an arranged marriage with a man she finds repulsive, the narrator takes action. She has the help of her sister's husband's grandfather, a wise old man who is dismissed as senile. With his connivance, she runs away to New Delhi and takes a job as a maid to the troubled Aziz family. This gives Balasubramanyam the chance to portray the lives of exploited servants and the rich, supercilious expatriate colony, a task he performs with humor and dexterity. It's unfortunate, however, that he makes Mr. Aziz and his wife, Ms. Marceau, so eccentric that they're virtually caricatures: the narrator's life in their home fails to seem credible. Yet Balasubramanyam is agile in depicting the narrator's gradual realization that she is not alone in her self-deception about her role in life, and that all people wear masks to disguise their real selves. (Feb.)Forecast: This novel won the 1999 Betty Trask Prize in England, and Balasubramanyam will assuredly take his place among the talented Indian writers of the decade. Though it lacks the power of The Death of Vishnu and The Obedient Father, it could be swept up in the groundswell of current novels whose characters have roots in India.

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