The Hero's Walk
List Price: $23.95
The Hero’s Walk is a remarkably intimate novel that fills the senses with the unique textures of India. With humor and keen insight, Anita Rau Badami draws us into her story of the graceful heroism of the ordinary.
The Hero's Walk, the second novel by Anita Rau Badami, is a big, intimate book, the kind that seldom strays beyond the doors of a single residence. Set in the sweltering streets of Toturpuram, a small city on the Bay of Bengal, The Hero's Walk, which won the 2001 Commonwealth Writers Prize for best book in Canada and the Caribbean, explores the troubled life of Sripathi Rao, an unremarkable, middle-aged family man and advertising copywriter.
This is a beautifully written book, especially with its slow lead into characterization. The characters have depth and presence and the reader can feel and connect with them all.
This novel is about an Indian man who is estranged from his daughter because she forsook an arranged marriage in India to marry a Canadian. She has tried to reconcile with her father who has coldly, with prideful distance, refused any connection with her. She and her husband die suddenly in an automobile accident and their traumatized daughter is left to be raised by her Indian grandparents.
How Sripathi works through his grief, confronting the pain of his choices which can never be undone, marks the essence of this book. The family comes alive on the pages, all in subtle and unambiguous character development.
I highly recommend this book.
Complex living in India
A Hero's walk is both a vivid, ala non-fiction portrayal of life in India and a richly-told fictional story of an extended family.
The story is set in a big, old house in southern India, complete with the heat, dust, street vendors, smells, sounds, neighbors, routine daily occurances, and a little squalor, all authentically rendered by an observant, native writer.
The family centers around the mis-understood, under-the-gun husband and his family's issues, his long-suffering, non-entity wife, her chronically unhappy (read whining, but vicious) aging Mother, their neer-do-well, lazy son, their long-missed successful daughter who has abandoned the family and India for the good life in Canada, her invisible husband, and their much-loved grandaughter.
Without giving anything away, the story leads to trauma for the grandaughter told very feelingly from her point of view. A very good novel.
Fun story about an middle class Indian family
This book is a light read. I would probably have not read it if it were written about an equivalent western family. The insights into Indian family dynamics make the story more interesting from the point of view of a person unfamiliar with the culture. Badami gets us to understand life of a middle class Indian family. The story is colorful and fun. Badami does a nice job of character development. At some point the father ends up going to Vancouver, Canada and bringing back his grandaughter back to India to live with the family. The contrast of life in India versus Vancouver is certainly interesting from the grandaughter's point of view.
This is not particularly fine literature, but a worthwhile read if you are interested in Indian culture especially.
Too hot for comfort
A modern day Brahmin family living on the eastern coast of southern India with all the attendant social ills and personal failings of real people who struggle along in every country to survive political corruption, loss of status, changing times, family death and their own pride. Told with great sympathy and gentle humor, this is a wonderful book about all of us.
What an amazing book, I was instantly hooked.
I cannot rave about this book enough. I was hooked from page one. The author's use of language was just beautiful, and I loved how the story tied together and had a most satisfying ending.
In fact, toward the middle I started getting antsy about how it would end, so I turned to read the last few pages (yeah, I do that). However, the author had apparently anticipated this move, and the answer to the question I had was nowhere to be found in the last few pages. I had to actually finish the book before I found out what happened. Excellent.
Other reviewers have given you the plot, so I won't do the same. I just wanted to chime in and say what a wonderful story this was, how utterly fascinating, and gripping from start to finish. I highly recommend it.
List Price: $23.95
Description
In a small, dusty town in India, Sripathi Rao struggles as a copywriter to keep his family afloat in their crumbling ancestral home. But his mother berates him for not becoming a lawyer, his son prefers social protest to work, his unmarried sister seethes with repressed desire, and his wife, though subservient, blames him for refusing to communicate with their daughter Maya, who defied tradition, rejecting her proper Brahmin fiancé for a Caucasian husband. Then a phone call brings tragedy: Maya and her husband have been killed in an accident leaving Sripathi to be their daughter’s guardian. Sripathi reluctantly travels to Vancouver to bring the child back to India. Nandana has not spoken a word since her parents’ death. Terrified, she resists her distant grandfather. Filled with guilt about his daughter but unable to express his feelings, Sripathi finds everything in his life falling apart. But with Nandana’s arrival, his world slowly, unexpectedly, finds new hope.The Hero’s Walk is a remarkably intimate novel that fills the senses with the unique textures of India. With humor and keen insight, Anita Rau Badami draws us into her story of the graceful heroism of the ordinary.
The Hero's Walk, the second novel by Anita Rau Badami, is a big, intimate book, the kind that seldom strays beyond the doors of a single residence. Set in the sweltering streets of Toturpuram, a small city on the Bay of Bengal, The Hero's Walk, which won the 2001 Commonwealth Writers Prize for best book in Canada and the Caribbean, explores the troubled life of Sripathi Rao, an unremarkable, middle-aged family man and advertising copywriter.
As The Hero's Walk opens, Sripathi's life is already in a state of thorough disrepair. His mother, a domineering, half-senile octogenarian, sits like a tyrant at the top of his household, frightening off his sister's suitors, chastising him for not having become a doctor, and brandishing her hypochondria and paranoia with sinister abandon. It is Sripathi's children, however, who pose the biggest problems: Arun, his son, is becoming dangerously involved in political activism, and Maya, his daughter, broke off her arranged engagement to a local man in order to wed a white Canadian. Sripathi's troubles come to a head when Maya and her husband are killed in an automobile accident, leaving their 7- year-old daughter, Nandana, without Canadian kin. Sripathi travels to Canada and brings his granddaughter home, while his family is shaken by a series of calamities that may, eventually, bring peace to their lives. --Jack Illingworth
Customer Reviews
Grief Over Choices that Can Never Be UndoneThis is a beautifully written book, especially with its slow lead into characterization. The characters have depth and presence and the reader can feel and connect with them all.
This novel is about an Indian man who is estranged from his daughter because she forsook an arranged marriage in India to marry a Canadian. She has tried to reconcile with her father who has coldly, with prideful distance, refused any connection with her. She and her husband die suddenly in an automobile accident and their traumatized daughter is left to be raised by her Indian grandparents.
How Sripathi works through his grief, confronting the pain of his choices which can never be undone, marks the essence of this book. The family comes alive on the pages, all in subtle and unambiguous character development.
I highly recommend this book.
Complex living in India
A Hero's walk is both a vivid, ala non-fiction portrayal of life in India and a richly-told fictional story of an extended family.
The story is set in a big, old house in southern India, complete with the heat, dust, street vendors, smells, sounds, neighbors, routine daily occurances, and a little squalor, all authentically rendered by an observant, native writer.
The family centers around the mis-understood, under-the-gun husband and his family's issues, his long-suffering, non-entity wife, her chronically unhappy (read whining, but vicious) aging Mother, their neer-do-well, lazy son, their long-missed successful daughter who has abandoned the family and India for the good life in Canada, her invisible husband, and their much-loved grandaughter.
Without giving anything away, the story leads to trauma for the grandaughter told very feelingly from her point of view. A very good novel.
Fun story about an middle class Indian family
This book is a light read. I would probably have not read it if it were written about an equivalent western family. The insights into Indian family dynamics make the story more interesting from the point of view of a person unfamiliar with the culture. Badami gets us to understand life of a middle class Indian family. The story is colorful and fun. Badami does a nice job of character development. At some point the father ends up going to Vancouver, Canada and bringing back his grandaughter back to India to live with the family. The contrast of life in India versus Vancouver is certainly interesting from the grandaughter's point of view.
This is not particularly fine literature, but a worthwhile read if you are interested in Indian culture especially.
Too hot for comfort
A modern day Brahmin family living on the eastern coast of southern India with all the attendant social ills and personal failings of real people who struggle along in every country to survive political corruption, loss of status, changing times, family death and their own pride. Told with great sympathy and gentle humor, this is a wonderful book about all of us.
What an amazing book, I was instantly hooked.
I cannot rave about this book enough. I was hooked from page one. The author's use of language was just beautiful, and I loved how the story tied together and had a most satisfying ending.
In fact, toward the middle I started getting antsy about how it would end, so I turned to read the last few pages (yeah, I do that). However, the author had apparently anticipated this move, and the answer to the question I had was nowhere to be found in the last few pages. I had to actually finish the book before I found out what happened. Excellent.
Other reviewers have given you the plot, so I won't do the same. I just wanted to chime in and say what a wonderful story this was, how utterly fascinating, and gripping from start to finish. I highly recommend it.