The novel`s peculiar brand of mysticism works well up to this point precisely because it works within a recognizable framework of reality. The final collapse of this framework undermines the fragile relationship, which Desai has created between a real, and an imagined landscape and in so doing undermines her greatest achievement. Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard is an utterly charming first novel of the author Kiran Desai.
Kiran Desai was born in India in 1971, she lived in Delhi till the age of 14. After that she spent a year in England, before her family moved to the USA. She completed her schooling in Massachusetts before attending Bennington College, Hollins University and Columbia University. In that university she studied creative writing, taking two years off to write Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard. She is the daughter of the famous writer Anita Desai. Although Kiran has not lived in India since she was 14, she returns to the family home in Delhi every year. She first came to literary attention in 1997 when she was published in the New Yorker and in Mirrorwork, an anthology of 50 years of Indian writing edited by Salman Rushdie - Strange Happenings in the Guava Orchard was the closing piece. In 1998, Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard, which had taken four years to write, was published to good reviews. She feels at home with the book as it is the voice from her heartwhat she feels for India. Eight years later, The Inheritance of Loss was published in early 2006, and won the 2006 Booker Prize. Her book are really interesting as it tales about the future and the past.
Synopsis:
`Hullabaloo in the guava orchard` is a challenging first novel by a talented author Kiran Desai. This book is filled with eccentric characters and crazy situations. The main situation of the novel concerns a ne`er-do-well son who gets fired from the post office. This happened because of the fact that he read the other people`s mails. He eventually retreats to a tree in the guava orchard and refuses to come down. The guy called Sampath suddenly jumps up a tree and decides to stay there. The story becomes exciting when all the people including his family starts believing that he has extraordinary powers and he is termed as god`s messenger. When a tribe of monkeys becomes friends with him, he becomes a celebrity saint named as "The Monkey Babu." The whole story is the surrounded around these monkeys and how the people try to get rid of them. In the end the reader is left with a smile on his face. For most of her book, Ms. Desai carries off the splendid trick of writing a poetic farce that nonetheless deals with bigger issues. She tries to draw a fine line between religious ecstasy and insanity. But even with as short a novel as this one, she could not sustain it. There is an outrageous sense of humor at work here. But the tone switched to the grim. With her silly sense of humor and her sumptuous command of the English language, Ms. Desai shows great promise. This novel can be called as a relief to all the readers who are bored with heavy reading.
This book `Hullabaloo in the guava orchard` is written by Kiran Desai and is published by the Anchor Publishing house.
