The Assassin's Song

Zusatztext “A deeply affecting story! full of contemplation and mystery. . . . At once lush and precise.” — Chicago Tribune “Thought-provoking and satisfying. . . . There are echoes of Rohinton Mistry! of V. S. Naipaul! of Salman Rushdie. But the lyricism of Karsan's contemplations! the careful evocation of place! the writer's obvious warmth for his characters! the sense of compassion layered into the story—these are all Vassanji's.” — The Washington Post Book World “A resplendent novel. . . .Vassanji eloquently details the sufferings of Karsan's family as the price of his individual freedom.” — The New Yorker “Moving. . . . A complex! multifaceted drama! one that interweaves history! religion and politics with a vibrant personal story.” — San Francisco Chronicle Informationen zum Autor M.G. Vassanji Klappentext In the aftermath of the brutal violence that gripped western India in 2002! Karsan Dargawalla! heir to Pirbaag - the shrine of a mysterious! medieval sufi - begins to tell the story of his family. His tale opens in the 1960s: young Karsan is next in line after his father to assume lordship of the shrine! but he longs to be "just ordinary.” Despite his father's pleas! Karsan leaves home behind for Harvard! and! eventually! marriage and a career. Not until tragedy strikes! both in Karsan's adopted home in Canada and in Pirbaag! is he drawn back across thirty years of separation and silence to discover what! if anything! is left for him in India. Leseprobe Chapter 1 Postmaster Flat, Shimla. April 14, 2002. After the calamity, a beginning. One night my father took me out for a stroll. This was a rare treat, for he was a reticent man, a great and divine presence in our village who hardly ever ventured out. But it was my birthday. And so my heart was full to bursting with his tall, looming presence beside me. We walked along the highway away from the village, and when we had gone sufficiently far, to where it was utterly quiet and dark, Bapu-ji stopped and stared momentarily at our broken, grey road blurring ahead into the night, then slowly turned around to go back. He looked up at the sky; I did likewise. “Look, Karsan,” said Bapu-ji. He pointed out the bright planets overhead, the speckle that was the North Star, at the constellations connected tenuously by their invisible threads. “When I was young,” he said, “I wished only to study the stars...But that was a long time ago, and a different world...“But what lies above the stars?” he asked, after the pause, his voice rising a bare nuance above my head. “That is the important question I had to learn. What lies beyond the sky? What do you see when you remove this dark speckled blanket covering our heads? Nothing? But what is nothing?”I was eleven years old that day. And my father had laid bare for me the essential condition of human existence.I gaped with my child’s eyes at the blackness above my head, imagined it as a dark blanket dotted with little stars, imagined with a shiver what might lie beyond if you suddenly flung this drapery aside. Loneliness, big and terrifying enough to make you want to weep alone in the dark.We slowly started on our way back home.“There is no nothing,” Bapu-ji continued, as if to assuage my fears, his tremulous voice cutting like a saw the layers of darkness before us, “when you realize that everything is in the One...”My father was the Saheb—the lord and keeper—of Pirbaag, the Shrine of the Wanderer, in our village of Haripir, as was his father before him, as were all our ancestors for many centuries. People came to him for guidance, they put their lives in his hands, they bowed to him with reverence.As we walked back together towards the few modest lights of Haripir, father and first son, a certain fear, a heaviness of the heart came over me. It never left me, even when I was far away in a world of my own making. Bu...

Dettagli sul prodotto

• Autori: M. G. Vassanji, M.G. Vassanji
• Editore: Vintage USA
• Lingue: Inglese
• Formato: Tascabile
• Pubblicazione: 12.08.2008
• EAN: 9781400076574
• ISBN: 978-1-4000-7657-4
• Pagine: 338
• Dimensioni: 127 mm x 210 mm x 13 mm
• Serie: Vintage Contemporaries; Vintage Contemporaries
• Categoria: Narrativa > Romanzi