Jadunath Kunwar's beginnings are inauspicious. His mother, while pregnant, nearly dies from a cobra bite. And this is only the first of many challenges in store for Jadu. As his life skates between the mythical and the mundane, Jadu finds meaning in the most unexpected places. He becomes a historian. He has a daughter. And he sees currents of huge change sweep across India--from Independence to Partition, Gandhi to Modi, the Mahabharata to Somerset Maugham--in ways that Jadu is both apart from and can't help but represent.
The novelist...tenderly sows the hundred and fifty or so pages with a trail of story and detail, and the remarkable life becomes also a beloved life, one compassionately appraised by the noticing novelist. And what noticing! ... His new novel is always deeply human; the heart is everywhere in these pages. It is easily the best thing Amitava Kumar has written, largely because the novelist relaxes into the novelistic, and trusts the tale rather than the teller. Its astonishing details sit in the text like little coiled stories, pointedly revealed but not overpoweringly unpacked by the writer.
Kumar tells Jadu’s story with a dispassionate stenographer’s air, a dutiful rendering of the minutiae of one man’s life ... The novel moves at a breathless pace, as if Kumar wants to get it all in, with stories large and small, important and unimportant. Before we can get into the interior life of one character, he leapfrogs into the life of another ... What the novel lacks is the kind of quiet interiority that makes for unforgettable characters.
A moving collection of memories and experiences entangled with world history ... In the skillful blending of individual experience with extraordinary world events, Kumar’s journalistic background shines through, often making one forget that this is a work of fiction.
