August 13, 2001
The death of an American woman in India serves as the pretext for a thoughtful, sociologically precise novel about the religious tensions racking the subcontinent. On September 30, 1989, in a riot that erupts in the town of Zalilgarh, east of New Delhi, 24-year-old Priscilla Hart, a volunteer with a population control organization, is stabbed to death. A few weeks later, Priscilla's divorced parents, Katharine and Rudyard Hart, travel to Zalilgarh to pick up her effects and to find out what happened. Tharoor divides the book into accounts devoted to the various actors, American and Indian, who played parts in Priscilla's fatal stay in Zalilgarh. From Priscilla's letters and diaries, we get a sense of the classic American sensibility, à la Daisy Miller—that mix of naïveté and sexual experience so puzzling to the rest of the world. Priscilla has a difficult affair with the married district magistrate, V. Lakshman, meeting him for trysts at a ruin outside town. Lakshman, the graduate of a highly selective Indian college, St. Stephens, has a penchant for Wilde, but he is bound to Indian tradition, and listens when his friend, police chief and fellow St. Stephens alumnus Gurinder Singh, emphasizes that, in Indian eyes, Priscilla is incurably promiscuous. Framing this love affair is the mounting tension between Muslims and the followers of Ram Charan Gupta, who want to destroy a local mosque and put up a Hindu temple on its site. Katharine and Rudyard Hart, accompanied by reporter Randy Diggs, never find all the clues to Priscilla's death—Gurinder has quietly given Lakshman Priscilla's scrapbook. Tharoor's story is about a larger topic than the undoing of one innocent American—it is about the potential fragmentation of the secular Indian republic, a tragedy in the making. Agent, Mary Evans.30,000 first printing; 6-city author tour.
August 3, 2001
Drawing on his political savvy as a senior United Nations official, Tharoor (India: From Midnight to the Millennium) has written an ingenious story of the investigation into the mysterious death of a young American woman during a Hindu-Muslim riot in a small Indian town, in 1989. When the parents of 24-year-old Priscilla Hart travel to India to find out the reason for their daughter's death, they encounter the slow and circuitous unfolding of their daughter's life in India. Working as a graduate student gathering information on family planning practices, and having fallen in love with a prominent, married law-enforcement official, Priscilla was na ve to the cultural and religious obligations that bound the man she loved, with heartbreaking results. Told through journal entries, interviews, newspaper clippings, and memories, the story unravels from a variety of perspectiveshistorical, political, personal, and religious. Recommended for both public and academic libraries.Michelle Reale, Elkins Park Free Lib., PA
Copyright 2001 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
August 1, 2001
There is no finer guide through the multilayered intricacies of India's diverse ideologies than Tharoor, a longtime UN diplomat and celebrated author. His latest novel" "opens with the murder of Priscilla Hart, an American student killed during a riot while in India, who worked with impoverished women on reproductive and population control issues. When her parents travel to India to probe the events preceding her death, they are told of Hindu-Muslim conflicts over the Babri mosque, which is situated on sacred Hindu ground, and of a chaotic religious parade that spiraled into violence. In reality, Priscilla's death is a paradox of love and hatred, and there is more to her demise than anyone will ever reveal. This novel unravels in a spellbinding fashion, asking the question, What is stronger--love or tradition? Tharoor, whose previous works are fascinating explorations of India's social climate, here reaches gingerly through a haze of violence and offers India in his cupped palm like a tiny bird that has not yet spread its wings to find its destiny.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2001, American Library Association.)