Product Description

"Riveting stuff, beautifully written . . . Superb" THE TIMES In India, at the birth of the last century, an infant is brought howling into the world, his remarkable paleness marking him out from his brown-skinned fellows. Revered at first, he is later cast out form his wealthy home when his true parentage is revealed. So begins Pran Nath's odyssey of self-discovery - a journey that will take him from the streets of Agra, via the red light district of Bombay, to the green lawns of England and beyond - as he struggles to understand who he really is.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #70330 in Books
• Published on: 2003-04-03
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 496 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
The anti-hero of The Impressionist, Hari Kunzru's daringly ambitious first novel, is half-English and half-Indian. In the Raj of the 1920s the racial and social divides are enormous but Pran Nath is able to bridge them, crossing from one side to another in a series of reinventions of his own personality. He begins as the spoilt child of an Indian lawyer but circumstances thrust him out of his pampered adolescence into the teeming and dangerous life of the streets. After a bewildering period as one of the pawns in Machiavellian political and sexual scheming at the decadent court of a minor Maharajah, he escapes to Bombay. There he is taken up by a half-demented Scottish missionary and his wife but prefers to slope off to the city's red light district whenever he can. During a time of riot and bloodshed the chance of recreating himself as an English schoolboy, destined for public school and Oxford, presents itself and he takes it. Even this is not to be his final transformation, however.

In some ways Kunzru is almost too ambitious. There is so much crammed into the pages of The Impressionist that some of it, almost inevitably, doesn't work as well as it might. However, as the shape-shifting Pran Nath moves from one identity to another, knockabout farce mixes with satire, social comedy with parody. And, beneath the comic exuberance and linguistic invention, there is an intelligent and occasionally moving examination of notions of self, identity and what it means to belong to a class or society. --Nick Rennison

Review
"Riveting stuff, beautifully written... Superb" THE TIMES

About the Author
Hari Kunzru was born in 1969 and lives in south-east London. He was an associate editor at WIRED and was named the OBSERVER Young Travel Writer of the Year in 1999. He is a contributing editor of MUTE magazine and music editor at WALLPAPER. THE IMPRESSIONIST is his first novel.

Customer Reviews

Witty and Wise
The Impressionist is Hari Kunzru's debut novel and was shortlisted for the Whitbread Prize. It tells the remarkable story of a young boy, Pran Nath, born in India at the beginning of the twentieth century and destined by way of mixed parentage to a long and complex journey in search of his true self. Thus, Kunzru's meditations on identity, race, the British Empire, and anthropology are woven into a plot which sees Pran pushed and pulled by a mixture of fate and chance through Bombay, Oxford and Africa.

This plot, loose though it is, moves along at an astonishing pace and is aided both by Kunzru's marvellous rendering of myriad characters and by his tragi-comic wit tinged with elements of farce. Read it twice - once for the humour, pathos and sheer exuberance, and again for the intellectual vigour which may well be lost in the sheer excitement of the first reading.

Dazzingly clever, deceptively complex.
The most wonderful aspect of this book is the reader's slowly growing awareness that this is not "just" another plot-driven novel with exotic locations and an unusual protagonist facing life-changing decisions, however fascinating they may be. It is also a deeply engrossing and carefully constructed tour de force which uses an exciting plot and a good deal of humor to make statements about the essence of selfhood, the importance of national and cultural identity, and, ultimately, our definitions of civilization and civilized behavior.

In a daring move, Kunzru throws the conventions of characterization to the winds. Instead of bringing his main character alive by showcasing his uniqueness and highlighting his different personal perspective on the world and its history, Kunzru does the opposite. In Pran/Rukhsana/Chandra/Pretty Bobby/Jonathan Bridgeman, he gives us a character who becomes, during the novel, less unique, more stereotypical--a man who sees life "in general" and from the perspective of whatever society he inhabits, a man who accepts the judgments and morality imposed upon him, acting, ultimately, "For God and England and the Empire and Civilization and Progress and Uplift and Morality and Honor."

Set primarily in the latter years of World War I and in the turbulent 1920's of the British Raj in India, the novel introduces Pran Nath Razdan, the beautiful, spoiled, and arrogant son of a wealthy court pleader in Agra. Banished from his home when his true status as a half Anglo is discovered, he must adapt to changed circumstances to stay alive. As the chief hijra of Fatehpur tells him when he assumes the role of Rukhsana and enters the harem of the Sultan, "We are all as mutable as the air! Just release...your body and you can be a myriad! An army!"

In successive roles in other locations, he learns to create impressions, to become stereotypical of the cultures in which he finds himself, to be whatever someone wants him to be, from a male prostitute and procurer in India to a student at Oxford and an assistant to an anthropologist in Africa. Along the way, he learns that it pays to be British--while the reader sees the extent to which British colonialism and arrogance have indelibly changed the world for the worse.

Satirical touches (not the least of which are some of the characters' names), broad humor, and irony make reading this story a continual delight, despite the author's occasional lapses into irrelevant background material for some of the characters. The descriptions are vibrant, the observations of human nature are incisive, the message is important, and the conclusion is wonderfully appropriate. This is a book which escapes the bounds of its plot to make an important anticolonial statement and promote respect for other, non-western cultures. Mary Whipple

Skin, Deep
I loved The Impressionist. It's set in the first quarter of the twentieth century and tells the story of the first twenty-odd years of the life of Pran Nath Razdan. The book opens (though we don't know it yet) with his conception, and then takes us to the Indian city of Agra, where Pran Nath is the coddled and spoiled child of a high-profile lawyer. Pran Nath is an uncommonly beautiful child, with fairer skin than anyone else in his family - which it turns out is because his father is not his father at all. This is discovered just as Razdan pere dies, and Pran Nath is thrown out of the household and left to make his way in the world.

And make his way he does, by adopting different guises and roles, ultimately masquerading as an orphan Jonathan Bridgeman, where he studies at Oxford and goes off on an anthropological expedition with his sweetheart's father to Africa. The sections of the book cover one "identity" each, and it's notable from the first change that Pran Nath never really makes the decision to change his role himself: his impressions are thrust on him by fate. This is an early indicator of what becomes glaringly apparent as the novel progresses - that Pran Nath, Pretty Bobby, Jonathan Bridgeman or whoever, has no character of his own. He is a void at the centre of the novel. Clearly this is deliberate, or at least understood by Kunzru, as we learn from this passage, where our hero watches a real impressionist on stage:

"The man becomes these other people so completely that nothing of his own is visible. A coldness starts to rise in Jonathan's gut, cutting through the vodka. He watches intently, praying that he is wrong, that he has missed something. There is no escaping it. In between each impression, just at the moment when one person falls away and the next has yet to take possession, the impressionist is completely blank. There is nothing there at all."

Nonetheless this emptiness at the centre does mean it's hard to see The Impressionist as more than a high-class entertainment, despite its occasional probes into racial acceptance and social satire. Still, high-class it certainly is, and quite simply one of the best-written books I've read, word for word, in ages. Kunzru has a real way with novel little expressions, none of which I can trace now of course to cite in evidence, but take my word for it that the book is never dull or hackneyed in its 500 pages. And Pran Nath's blankness is amply balanced by the richness of the surrounding characters - I was constantly finishing little vignettes into the characters' pasts with a smile on my face of pure satisfaction. (The relating of a form of futures trading in a primitive society is particularly original and brilliant.) Even characters who only appear in a few lines have a curious vividness:

Rising up behind the main hall, the glasshouses appear like a miniature crystal palace, glittering in the sunshine. Mesmerized, Jonathan is approaching them across the back lawn, when a voice bellows out, stopping him dead in his tracks.
"Boy! BOY!"
He wheels around to find a red-faced man leaning out of an upstairs window.
"What on earth do you think you're doing?"
"Going -"
"What?"
"Going -"
"WHAT? I hardly think you should be going anywhere over the grass. Regard! What you have wrought!"
Jonathan looks down, and sees that his shoes have left a trail of little bruises on the sleek green-striped surface.

"Lawn!" shouts the man. "Parents, masters and senior domestic staff only! Exceptions! Prefects on Sundays! All upper-form boys on Founders Day between two and four in the afternoon! Now get off!"
Gingerly Jonathan steps onto a gravel path. The window is slammed shut. He thinks for a moment, takes out his pocket book and writes: further demonstration of the significance of lawns. Englishness seeps a little deeper into his skin.

However I expect that the absence of human interest from the central character's blankness will stop The Impressionist from becoming the Corelli/Birdsong-level word of mouth hit that it richly deserves to be. Nonetheless Kunzru is a talent to watch who will, I hope, go on to do even greater things.