Exotic
in locale, Dickensian in scope, this first novel introduces
a protagonist like no other in modern fiction. Pran Nath
Razdan is the Impressionist, a young boy living a privileged
and pampered life in 1918 Agra, a bustling Indian city just
downriver from the Taj Mahal. Untouched by the influenza
epidemic raging through this town, Pran enjoys all the advantages
of belonging to one of the world's most exclusive Hindu
castes. He is beautiful beyond measure, his pearly skin
even more striking confirmation of his elite Kashmiri status.
But Pran is not who he appears to be: Fifteen years earlier,
his true father - an Englishman - died, and his Brahman
mother passed their infant off as the son of her husband,
a distinguished man of letters and the law. Only one person
knows the truth about Pran's tainted blood: Jyoti, the family
cook and a woman with her own agenda. When she reveals Pran's
true parentage to his dying father the boy is tossed out
into the street - a pariah and an outcast. Thus begins the
extraordinary, near-mythical journey of a young man who
must reinvent himself in order to survive… not once
but many times.
…
As the Impressionist, he will roam the world, fulfilling
people's secret fantasies, becoming whatever it is they
want him to be. Until nothing of his own self is visible.
The face behind the mask. The shadow behind the shadow.
A shell game. An illusion. A trick of the light… Now
you see him…
Set against a sweeping backdrop of world history and played
out on a vast, teeming canvas, The Impressionist tells the
unforgettable story of a boy who is born a lie and must
adapt in order to survive. It is an astonishing work of
gripping narrative power and dazzling imagination.
—Penguin Putnam
Kunzru
is an expert in crossing boundaries and The Impressionist
is no exception. An epic adventure traversing through
Raj India, 1920's Oxford and finally the imaginary 'Fotseland'
in Africa, Kunzru navigates the issues of identity, Empire
and race through the eyes of an ultimate conjurer, the 'rootless'
outcaste Pran Nath.
(http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/books/author/kunzru/)
The
impressionist in Hari Kunzru's first novel creates self-portraits,
just not on canvas. Pran Nath Razdan, born at roughly the
same time as the 20th century out of a stormy encounter
between a stray Indian beauty and an English functionary
of the British Empire, reinvents himself several times.
Each impression he does brings him closer to his ideal of
a proper Oxonian and farther from his conflicted identity
as a "blackie-whitie," a swarthy half-caste despised
by both sides of an ethnic divide. Or so he believes.
—Daily News, New York, April 7, 2002
The
Impressionist is a picaresque stitch, a deadly serious
book about race and empire that can still put a reader on
the floor with the exquisitely timed comic understatement
of its language. At times Kunzru seems almost too confidently
in command of his themes, deploying Ellisonian images of
light and shadow -- and the scary but heartening smudge
where their boundaries blur -- with a facility that borders
on the facile.
—The San Francisco Chronicle, April 7, 2002
The
Impressionist is a sprawling,
ambitious, shape-shifting novel in which minor characters
are given entire complex histories of their own and the
restless protagonist, an Anglo-Indian boy named Pran Nath
Rasdan, perpetually shrugs off personae, looking for an
identity that feels just right. He's not unlike Patricia
Highsmith's Ripley, though far less sinister. Pran is conceived
one stormy night in 1903, the result of a "inexpert
and violent" sexual encounter between a young Englishman
and a 19-year-old Indian woman. She dies giving birth to
Pran; he's raised by her aristocrat Kashmiri husband, who
believes the beautiful boy is his own.
Kunzru
uses the clumsy circumstances of Pran's birth to slyly examine
issues of race, identity and home. The author has chosen
an ideal place and time in which to set his ideas into play;
in the early 20th century, the British were "technologists
who [had] all India under their control." This was
also when India was agitating for home rule, and when influenza
spread devastation through the country.
—The Washington Post, April 14, 2002
