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Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard by Kiran…
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Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard (original 1998; edition 1999)

by Kiran Desai

MembersReviewsPopularityAverage ratingMentions
9323022,501 (3.53)69
Sampath Chawla is born into a family slightly off kilter, to a mother not quite like her neighbors, in a town not quite like other towns. After years of failure at school, failure at work, it does not seem as if Sampath is going to amount to much.Then Sampath climbs up a guava tree in search of a life of peaceful contemplation -- and becomes famous as a hermit. Written with rich humor and an eye for the eccentric, this is a magical tale of a world gone slightly mad.… (more)
Member:nans
Title:Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard
Authors:Kiran Desai
Info:Anchor (1999), Reprint, Paperback
Collections:Read but unowned
Rating:***
Tags:Read 2007

Work Information

Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard by Kiran Desai (1998)

  1. 30
    Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel (MaidMeri)
    MaidMeri: Desai's book is a much, much lighter read, but like Esquivel's, full of trivial yet delightful details and sub-plots. Other similarities include cooking, being repressed by one's family and eccentric, strong female characters.
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» See also 69 mentions

Showing 1-5 of 30 (next | show all)
This book was silly and fun. I'm not clear on to what degree it was supposed to be hard-hitting social commentary. ( )
  ZannaZori | Aug 3, 2022 |
I read this several years ago,dont remember much of it except that it wasnt a book I hated but I didnt love it either.

( )
  Litrvixen | Jun 23, 2022 |
I'm a little confused about this book. Reading it in highly urban India, I really liked the description of the wild. I loved Kulfi's appetite and her wondrous palette. The civil servants were all delightful- from the new DC to the Post master to Miss Divya, the CMO, the Brigadier... And that cute love story between Pinky, ice cream boy and miss birthday cake.
However, so often, the book also read like a cheap, hollow satire at a concept of 'India', betraying the ugly divide between the westernized Indians and those that can 'act as subjects'.

For the lovely description of the Guava Orchard I really needed in these last few days, i rate it a 3 ( )
  zasmine | Apr 25, 2021 |
This book did not work for me. It is a satire, clearly, from the tone and the content, but a satire of what? Of gurus and swamis and their devotees? Okay, but then it is too shallow a satire of that, enough material in there to fit into a short story, just barely. A novel needs more development. A novel should not be capable of being summarised completely in one sentence: a man takes up residence in a tree and dispenses made-up homilies and metaphors that devotees receive as wisdom.

Is it a satire of chefs with wild imaginations and even wilder tastes? Of young love? Of monkeys in urban India? I don't get it. I just don't get it. ( )
1 vote nandiniseshadri | Jul 12, 2020 |
Entertaining fable of modern-day India. Sampath, who has never amounted to anything, runs away and climbs the guava tree where he becomes known as the Monkey Baba - an esteemed holy man revered by his village and other pilgrims. ( )
  BookConcierge | Feb 11, 2016 |
Showing 1-5 of 30 (next | show all)
HULLABALOO IN THE GUAVA ORCHARD

Although the publishers of "Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard" have been comparing the book to Arundhati Roy's award-winning novel "God of Small Things," 27-year old Kiran Desai turns out to have less in common with Ms. Roy or Salman Rushdie than with an older generation of Indian writers, including her mother, Anita Desai, and R.K. Narayan. There are no grand, mythic visions at work in "Hullabaloo," no ambitious displays of magical realism. Rather, the novel stands as a meticulously crafted piece of gently comic satire -- a small, finely tuned fable that attests to the author's pitch-perfect ear for character and mood, and her natural storytelling gifts.

As Mr. Narayan has done in his well-known Malgudi stories, Ms. Desai has conjured up a small Indian town, poised midway between tradition and modernity, and focused on the life of one of that town's anonymous inhabitants -- a dreamy, introspective fellow torn between his familial obligations and his own desire to be left alone.

In the case of "Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard," this dreamer is a slovenly young man named Sampath Chawla, who was born in the town of Shahkot during a historic monsoon that ended months of drought. For years, Sampath has done nothing to live up to the expectations wrought by his auspicious birth: he has sleepwalked through school, daydreamed through work. Since getting a job at the local post office, he has spent most of his free time reading other people's mail and musing about their lives.

Although Sampath causes his go-getter father endless grief, his grandmother prophesizes great things: "But the world is round," she declares. "Wait and see! Even if it appears he is going downhill, he will come up out on the other side. Yes, on top of the world. He is just taking the longer route."

Because "Hullabaloo" is the kind of fable where prophecies always come true, Sampath's grandmother is quickly proven correct. Not long after Sampath runs away from home and takes up residence in a guava tree with a band of monkeys, he is being acclaimed as the hermit of Shahkot, a visionary blessed with "an unusual spiritual nature." His furtive reading of other people's mail has endowed him with what seems like the power of second sight, just as his simple-minded love of adages promotes a reputation for "unfathomable wisdom."

If Sampath's incongruous enshrinement as a wise man plays off the hallowed Indian tradition of spiritual enlightenment, the events that accompany his newly discovered holiness read like an out-and-out sendup of the Western cult of celebrity. Sampath's ambitious father is soon gussying up his son's orchard bower (trying hard to keep a balance "between the look of abstemiousness and actual comfort") and concocting a host of moneymaking schemes designed to capitalize on his son's newfound fame. Soon, buses and rickshaws are bringing tourists to visit "the famous Baba in his treetop hermitage," and making Sampath's family rich.

All is not well, however. Sampath's monkey companions have developed a taste for liquor and become a growing public nuisance. Worse, a spy for the local Atheist Society has vowed to expose Sampath as a fraud. "It was precisely people like Sampath who obstructed the progress of this nation, keeping honest, educated people like him in the backwaters along with them," the spy thinks. "They ate away at these striving, intelligent souls, they ate away at progress and smothered anybody who tried to make a stand against the vast uneducated hordes, swelling and growing toward the biggest population of idiots in the world."

Ms. Desai does a clever, dexterous job of orchestrating these events, and in doing so introduces a sprawling cast of characters rendered in bright folk-art colors. There's Sampath's immediate family, of course: his hustling, status-conscious father; his eccentric, ditsy mother and his pushy, man-handling sister. And then there are the town officials, charged with containing the hullabaloo surrounding Sampath: Vermaji, a monkey expert who is puffed up with self-importance; the brigadier, who would rather count the birds in his garden than preside over his troops, and the superintendent of police, who neglects his duties in hopes of being demoted. Filling out the cast are Sampath's former colleagues at the post office, an unfortunate ice cream vendor who catches the attention of Sampath's bossy sister and a chorus of pilgrims and tourists.

These bumbling characters may teeter on the edge of caricature, but the author delineates them with such wit and bemused affection that they insinuate themselves insidiously in our minds, even as they lend the fictional town of Shahkot a palpable fairy tale charm. With "Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard," Ms. Desai has made a modest but enchanting debut.

 
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For my family with love
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That summer the heat had enveloped the whole of Shahkot in a murky yellow haze. The clutter of rooftops and washing lines that usually stretched all the way to the foothills at the horizon grew blurred and merged with the dust-filled sky.
Quotations
Sampath thought how strangely he thought of beauty. He was greedy for it, insatiably greedy. He could watch it constantly and never could he do it justice... At first, he had stared intently, watched everything about him with a fierce urge to take it all and imprint it within himself, every detail, every sweep. He had stared so that tremors ran over him, until this encounter with something that he could not believe, lying there right before his eyes , had him in its thrall. He had closed his eyes to check if it had indeed entered him, as he hoped it would- to see if the landscape before him could be conjured up inside him, at will.

But, again and again, he opened his eyes to find that no, the picture in his mind could not replicate what lay outside; he had only to turn to have it all rush away, the way the night's dreams recede like waves, leaving you with nothing when you wake. He could not claim it. If only it would reach out and claim him instead. If he stayed here long enough within reach of its sights and sounds, might it not enter him in the manner landscape enters everything that lives within it.
After a month in the orchard, he had come to the conclusion that collecting was only worthwhile if you lived away from what you were collecting, not if you existed amidst all the bounty of your desire, not if you lived right where all you loved gre or crawled constantly by you.
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Sampath Chawla is born into a family slightly off kilter, to a mother not quite like her neighbors, in a town not quite like other towns. After years of failure at school, failure at work, it does not seem as if Sampath is going to amount to much.Then Sampath climbs up a guava tree in search of a life of peaceful contemplation -- and becomes famous as a hermit. Written with rich humor and an eye for the eccentric, this is a magical tale of a world gone slightly mad.

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