Product Description

Born a Parsi in Bombay and educated in Vienna, Dr Farrokh Daruwalla is a Canadian citizen, an orthopedic surgeon, living in Toronto. Periodically, he returns to India. Once 20 years ago, Dr Darwalla was the examining physician of two murder victims in Goa. Now, he is reacquainted with the murderer.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #60384 in Books
• Published on: 1995-09-07
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 829 pages

About the Author
John Irving
John Irving was born in Exeter, New Hampshire, in 1942, and he once admitted that he was a 'grim' child. Although he excelled in English at school and knew by the time he graduated that he wanted to write novels, it was not until he met a young Southern novelist named John Yount, at the University of New Hampshire, that he received encouragement. 'It was so simple,' he remembers. 'Yount was the first person to point out that anything I did except writing was going to be vaguely unsatisfying.'

In 1963, Irving enrolled at the Institute of European Studies in Vienna, and he later worked as a university lecturer. His first novel, Setting Free the Bears, about a plot to release all the animals from the Vienna Zoo, was followed by The Water-Method Man, a comic tale of a man with a urinary complaint, and The 158-Pound Marriage, which exposes the complications of spouse-swapping. Irving achieved international recognition with The World According to Garp, which he hoped would 'cause a few smiles among the tough-minded and break a few softer hearts'.

The Hotel New Hampshire is a startlingly original family saga, and The Cider House Rules is the story of Doctor Wilbur Larch - saint, obstetrician, founder of an orphanage, ether addict and abortionist - and of his favourite orphan, Homer Wells, who is never adopted. A Prayer for Owen Meany features the most unforgettable character Irving has yet created. A Son of the Circus is an extraordinary evocation of modern day India. John Irving's latest and most ambitious novel is A Widow for One Year.

A collection of John Irving's shorter writing, Trying to Save Piggy Sneed, was published in 1993. Irving has also written the screenplays for The Cider House Rules and A Son of the Circus, and wrote about his experiences in the world of movies in his memoir My Movie Business.

Irving has had a life-long passion for wrestling, and he plays a wrestling referee in the film of The World According to Garp. In his memoir, The Imaginary Girlfriend, John Irving writes about his life as a wrestler, a novelist and as a wrestling coach. He now writes full-time, has three children and lives in Vermont and Toronto.

Customer Reviews

Dissapointing, though well informed about Bombay/ India
As an Indian living in Bombay, and a fan of Irving since I was sixteen, I was pleased to see that, except for one or two bloopers, Irving's India facts are mostly right. (For that time and given his caste, MrIrving, Farokh's secretary would never have had as modern a name as that. And the basic premise of a character like Inspector Dhar succeeding .... rather unconvincing) .That is a credit one can bestow on very few foreign (Caucasian?) authors writing on India. And its funny! But, in the wake of Garp , Meany and Hampshire, this book fails to deliver. Where is the essential tragedy that makes for a quintessential Irving? Why do you finish the book not caring at all about any character, least of all the rather irritating Doctor? Two stars only .... because Garp and Homer Wells deserve better.

Chaos theory
John Irving's leitmotifs make for a curious collection. Wrestling; veneral disease; bombs; car and other freak accidents. Vienna; bears; sex-change operations; dwarves. Prostitutes; New England; precarious marriages and necessary infidelities.

When a critical mass of these Irving fetishes appears within a few pages, one can nearly hear the slow-motion crack of a bat nailing a baseball way, way out into the stands.

One of the most interesting features of his work is the convoluted logic which allows each of these themes to be worked into his lunatic subplots. Irving has the wonderful sadism of the best story-tellers, dragging out a chain of events over pages and pages.

"A Son of the circus" is the first Irving novel to make use of the wider world (i.e. not Vienna or New England). Irving sets down the massive machinery of his unsummarizable plots in India. India is a fitting world for him, with all its hugeness, sectarian chaos and multi-everything diversity.

Tom Wolfe has sharply criticized Irving for returning with a mere topography of India, and not a journalistic dissertation. This criticism, while not entirely unfair, is surely irrelevant to Irving's purposes. He has no pretence about being another Joseph Conrad or Ryszard Kapuscinski. Why compete with Salman Rushdie as India's novelist when Irving can bring his own mad vision to an unfamiliar nation?

"A son of the circus" involves a large number of typically bizarre components. An exhibitionist aristocrat named Lady Duckworth after whom Bombay's most prestigous social club is named. A Bombay-born, North Americanized orthopedist who adopts a beautiful boy for whom he writes movies scripts. A serial killing man-turned-woman who draw winking elephants on the stomachs of her victims. In such company, drug-smuggling hippies and a circus full of dwarves are nearly banal.

The chapter headings (such as "The Doctor Dwells on Lady Duckworth's Breasts", or "A Misunderstanding at the Urinal") are surely among the most wonderfully berserk in modern literature.

Irving's character studies are a masterful blend of punning names, verbal tics, and physical features rendered as Homeric epithets. According to the whims of his plots, Irving can suddenly inject a previously flat character with detailed history and motivation.

The concentration on form required of a novel which swalls the structure of a murder mystery whole results in a certain diminishment of emotional energy. While this cast of characters can make you laugh hysterically, unusually for Irving, it can't make you cry. Peerless in his mastery of the comedic epic, second-rate Irving is still first-rate American literature.

... ambitious, difficult, utterly brilliant.
'A son of the circus' is undoubtably Irving's most ambitious novel to date - and he succeeds brilliantly. It is a thrilling, highly complex epic about identity, history, East and West, mixed with sex, murder and subversive humour only the way Irving can.

Having read almost all of Irving's books, I would say this is one of his best novels too. But it is a difficult read. In a way, it is very non-Irving. Normally, Irving's storytelling is 'easy', always keeping the reader in mind, making sure he/she can follow, taking you by the hand. 'A son of the circus' feels like a culture shock, leaving you bewildered in its wide range of emotions, descriptions, themes, details and storylines. It starts slowly, includes long flasbacks and has many different fully developed characters.

Yet, once you're familiar with its universe, it opens up, does not let you go and fluently leads you to the finale, grand in its simplicity and honesty.

It is a must-read that can be easily compared to the best work of Umberto Eco or Salman Rushdie.

So here is what to do: Try 'The Fourth Hand' or 'A prayer for Owen Meany", become an Irving fan and then read 'A son of the circus'. You'll see...