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Raj Kamal Jha. PHOTO:
Raaj Dayal
The Blue Bedspread
A Novel by Raj Kamal Jha
Fiction / Literature | Random House | Hardcover | April 2000 | $ 21.95
| 0-375-50312-9
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an excerpt from the book
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RAJ
KAMAL JHA is
author
of The Blue Bedspread, a novel that has won acclaim around the world.
He was
born in 1966 and grew up in Calcutta. After graduating with a degree in
mechanical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur,
he received his master's in journalism from the University of Southern
California. He lives in New Delhi, where he is an editor at The Indian
Express, a national newspaper.
About The Blue Bedspread
A
midnight phone call awakens a man to inform him that his sister has died
in childbirth. He is told he must keep the orphaned baby girl overnight,
until her new, adopting parents can collect her. Over the course of that
hot night in Calcutta, the man hurriedly writes stories to the baby sleeping
on a blue bedspread in the next room: stories of the family she was born
into, stories of the mother she will never know. Painting half-remembered
scenes, he flits between past and present, recounting tales of the shared
childhood of a boy and his sister who muffled their fears in the blueness
of that very same bedspread. As the hours pass, the man gradually divulges
a layered and transfixing confession of the darkest of family secrets.
Described by John Fowles as "remarkable, almost a coming-of-age of the
Indian novel," this powerful, penetrating debut by a young New Delhi journalist
has already been recognized as an international literary event. In prose
that is breathtaking and precise, Raj Kamal Jha discovers the hidden violence
and twisted eroticism of an exotic, overcrowded old city. Unlike the India
captured in the exotic prose of Salman Rushdie and Arundhati Roy, Jha
writes in a spare, straightforward style that has prompted comparisons
to American realists like Raymond Carver and Don DeLillo. The Blue Bedspread
is a searingly honest story about the love and hope that can survive in
the midst of family violence. It is a first novel of extraordinary power
and humanity.
Advance
praise for The Blue Bedspread
"Something rather remarkable, almost a coming-of-age of the Indian novel."
--John Fowles
"From the first pages I was drawn in by the mysterious staccato of Jha's
prose. This is a major talent."
--Mary Karr, author of The Liars' Club
"If you want to get ahead of the literary game this year, practice getting
your jaws around the following syllables: Raj Kamal Jha. He writes like
an Indian Raymond Carver."
--The Independent on Sunday (London)
"Jha is a remarkable writer, both in excess and restraint."
--London Sunday Times
"This poetic first novel . . . is an incantatory, audacious book, notable
for moments of great poignancy."
--The Guardian (London)
"A ghostly, elliptical piece of prose of quite magical quality, which
tells the story of one man's reconciliation with his past. Spare and yet
richly patterned . . . undeniably powerful."
--London Evening Standard
"A shocking novel . . . with a brilliant finale."
--The Times Literary Supplement (London)
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an excerpt from the book
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