[.uk] Son of the Circus, A (ISBN 1423335996)

i read it thru india and felt india thru it:
i read it 10 years ago as i was working in india. It was the greater litterature experience i have ever lived. i discovered india thru it and i felt its atmosphere thru india. it is a great work of art putting all the feelings at their paroxysms. i loved india thru it, i roamed about bombay streets to better breath that special air that fills this work of art, i walked along the streets where the cages can be found, went to the necklace bay. and the highest emotion i got it when i went in a shabby circus with my familly (from which we brought back the biggest lice i have ever seen). if i must keep one book i think it will be this one.

Three Rings Won't Be Enough:
Not as popular as some of his other novels, A SON OF THE CIRCUS is John Irving's entertaining stab at taking his trademark writing foibles, the eccentric characters, the bit-too-clever coincidences, and transporting them out of New England and taking them to another locale. Specifically, India. For the most part, it is a stab that hits its mark. Although not quite as good as Irving's best, such as A PRAYER FOR OWEN MEANY or A WIDOW FOR ONE YEAR, this book belongs solidly in the second tier of Irving's works and shares with most of his other writings the ease of reading literature that, if not complex, certainly rises above the average and mundane. The plot involves a serial killer offing various prostitutes and leaving his calling card carved into their flesh. This being Irving, the killer's penchant for, well, killing, is not his sole quirk. Events of the past are brought into the present as a doctor, Farrokh Daruwalla, takes a break from studying circus dwarves and hunts for the criminal. We meet various miscreants and outcasts and, perhaps worst of all, an American hippy, along the way. Irving obviously enjoys exploring those at the fringes of society and he brings that interest here. In fact, like many of Irving's stories, the characters at the fringes really are the story, but the guy needs some plot to string them together. That the society in question, again India, is very different from Irving's usual stomping grounds allows for much of this to feel fresh in a way that otherwise might have felt tedious and cliche. Irving explores, as he does in other works, religion and how it both brings people together and keeps them apart. One of the more entertaining subplots involves a famous, but currently detested, movie star in India. His identical twin brother, a priest with a taste for self-punishment to bring himself closer to Christ, is coming to India -- with no idea that he even has a twin, no idea that 'his' face is famous throughout the subcontinent, and no idea that it is reviled! Guess you're really going to start getting the punishment you want there, dude. I once heard Roger Ebert debate a James Bond movie with the late Gene Siskel. Siskel, who gave the flick a thumbs down, asked whether Ebert would seriously recommend the movie to someone. Ebert's response was great, saying that he would ask the guy if he liked James Bond movies. If the guy said yes, Ebert would tell him to see it. If the guy said no, Ebert would tell him not to. The same hold true here. Do you like John Irving books? If you answer yes, read this. If you answer no, then don't. One final note. It is this book, A SON OF THE CIRCUS, that was Irving's latest when he, along with John Updike and Norman Mailer, ripped into Tom Wolfe and Wolfe's spectacularly successful, and spectacularly entertaining, book A MAN IN FULL. Wolfe, being Wolfe, shot back in a wonderful essay entitled My Three Stooges, belittling Irving specifically for writing novels that were unrealistic, with particular scorn for Irving's latest attempt. Although I, obviously, do not buy into Wolfe's views wholesale, I cannot deny a large grain of truth to them. Much of what is in A SON OF THE CIRCUS is ridiculous. But that is, of course, an entirely different matter from whether it is an entertaining read. Also recommended: A Prayer for Owen Meany, John Irving A Widow for One Year (Modern Library of the World's Best Books), John Irving A Man in Full, Tom Wolfe Hooking Up, Tom Wolfe

Son of a what?:
A Son of the Circus is Irving's longest novel - the addition I read having been 829 pages! - and in it he visits well-worn Irvingesque motifs (dwarfs, sex crimes, amputations, Vienna, everything but a bear, actually, although there are plentiful animals, both dead and alive) en route to new territory, for the novel is largely set in India. In his introduction he makes a disclaimer: The novel is not, he says, about India. Perhaps it was necessary to make such a disclaimer: an Indian reader might be tempted to ask what gave Irving, a New Englander, the right to think that he could produce "the great Indian novel". But I have a feeling that the disclaimer is unnecessary for non-Indian readers, such as myself, and particularly for those - again, like me - who are not living in their home country. These hundreds of pages are about foreignness, about not belonging, about the persistent feeling that something isn't sitting quite right. This is the ever-present preoccupation of the novel's protagonist, a Bombay-born naturalized Canadian orthopedic surgeon named Farrokh Daruwalla. Although he is the only character wracked by the question of where he is actually from, nearly every other character deals, consciously or not, with what is essentially the same question, Who am I? Nancy, an expatriate farm-girl from Iowa who married an upright Bombay detective after her misadventures with a German drug-dealer, is acutely aware of where she is from and is locked in a world that doesn't accept her even after twenty years. The doctor's adopted brother, twenty years his junior, is an actor with two names, neither of which are in fact real. He is the star of a long-running series of much-hated detective movies, a series produced and almost exclusively shown in Bombay and which with each successive installment manages to insult if not a large than at least a dangerous element of the city's population. In Bombay the actor actually goes by the name of his character, Inspector Dhar - the name even appears in his passport - and is so thoroughly identified with the tough-guy, womanizing Hindi gun-slinger that he rarely steps out of character when he is in Bombay. He spends much of his time, however, in Zurich, where he's a respected actor at the Schauspielhaus. His sexually ambiguity redoubles his double life, at least in the mind of his fatherly adoptive brother, Dr. Daruwalla. There is a dwarf, formerly a circus clown, who after an acrobatic injury founds a private taxi company and earns a reputation as the thug chauffeur for Inspector Dhar. In fact, he remains a clown throughout the novel. The motif of not belonging, of leading a double life, is taken to the brink of credibility - but Irving pulls it off - with the introduction of Inspector Dhar's twin brother, a Jesuit missionary from California, from whom he was separated at birth. On the surface, this is a detective novel, a captivating hunt for a serial murderer, who, it should come as no surprise, struggles with the question of identity at least as much as the other characters. The crime story, however, functions more basically as a vehicle for bringing diverse characters together. Irving shoots for universal truths in his novels and those truths are arrived at by often lonely characters who feel cut off from any sort of universality. True to Irving's long established style, A Son of the Circus is poignantly funny, full of characters in obvious pain doing odd things. Every now and then a parenthetical statement or a redundant sentences made me feel like the work could have been 50 to 100 pages shorter without loosing much. But then again, it is the kind of work one doesn't mind being so long, as the characters gradually become likable and the reader becomes ever more interested in their fates. The novel requires such a substantial investment of one's limited reading time, however, that I wouldn't recommend it to a newcomer to Irving. The writer's signature style is more accessible and immediately enjoyable in many of his earlier (and considerably shorter) works. To Irving fans, those with an interest in India, and those concerned with the question of foreignness and identity, I warmly recommend this novel.

Grow into this book:
I read this book when it was first released and, for some reason, really disliked it. Maybe it is my mellowing with age, but, upon recently re-reading it, I truly enjoyed it. Now, I am a huge Irving fan, which helps; he has a quirky style and a self-indulgent pugnacity that is either off-putting or delightful, depending on your perspective. It helps if you are both familiar with Irving and familiar with Indian novelists like Salman Rushdie. Try it again!

Bombay, Dearest:
Some of my most favorite books of all times are by John Irving. Usually when I pick one up, I can't put it down. After reading 100 pages of A Son of the Circus, I can't seem to pick it back up. This novel got away from him.