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Pub Date: 2014-04-07 Pages: 288 Language: English Publisher: WWNorton 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.
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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."
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 is 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 emerging with great subtlety and care. --Claire Dederer
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- PublisherW. W. Norton & Company
- Publication date2014
- ISBN 10 0393337812
- ISBN 13 9780393337815
- BindingPaperback
- Number of pages288
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