Stealing the Ambassador
A Novel
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- $18.99
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
Caught between a father who thought success and freedom could be found only in America and a grandfather who risked his life to guarantee such ideals in their homeland of India, twenty-three-year-old Rajiv Kothari is lost in a nation he has always called home and beckoned by the one his father left long ago. Stealing the Ambassador is a literary page-turner that blends the experiences of a first-generation Indian American with those of his immigrant father and revolutionary grandfather, their intertwined stories probing the balance between fiction and history, between old country and new, between fathers and sons.
Following his father's sudden death, Rajiv finds himself alone and bewildered. As he attempts to reconstruct his father's life, he begins to better understand his own, and when he chances to meet a new Indian immigrant, eerily reminiscent of his own father, their uncanny interaction grants Rajiv insight into the euphoria that his father felt when he first arrived in the country and its gradual deterioration into frustrated estrangement.
Events lead Rajiv to a reverse migration, back to the subcontinent of his father's birth. There he reconnects with his aged grandfather -- once a saboteur responsible for bombings in pre-Independence British India and now mysteriously destitute. Discovering the source of this impoverishment, Rajiv is awakened to a second understanding of his childhood hero, a reconsideration that illuminates the relationships between grandfather, father, and grandson while pointing to new definitions of bravery and familial loyalty.
Stealing the Ambassador is a stunning debut from the young Sameer Parekh. In depicting the ways that families are at the source of both our frustration with and our loyalty to identity, Parekh sheds new light on the immigrant experience and on the complexity and power of family relations.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Parekh's debut novel is a curious amalgam: part coming-of-age story, part father and son story, part immigrant story and part (a very small part) suspense tale. While none of these stories comes into sharp relief, Parekh never loses control of them, and their poignancy grows as the novel progresses. Rajiv Kothari, the novel's narrator and protagonist, begins with an arresting and vividly told tale about his grandfather. In 1935, in pre-independence India, Rajiv's grandfather blows up a bridge. Though he escapes imprisonment, his young wife does not; after her term, they set up life in a new city with new names and apparently live a conventional Gujarati life. The reader expects, and eventually receives, a revisionist telling of this history. But first Parekh moves ahead to 1966 and the homelier story of Rajiv's father, Vasant, and his immigration to the United States. (Vasant comes to study electrical engineering and stays.) The son's story is implicit in the father's, so that too comes to the foreground. Parekh paints these stories in broad strokes, telling more than he shows, making this part of the novel less gripping but never uninteresting for Parekh is a keen observer of the immigrant's plight. Eventually, he brings together the strands of his story, sending Rajiv to India, where he learns the real story of the bombing and joins a plot that involves an Ambassador the Indian copy of a British auto, once India's most popular car. Though Parekh is not yet an accomplished stylist and his narrative shifts are often clumsy, he provokes real feeling. Particularly moving are the letters that close each of the novel's six chapters. Written by Vasant when he first arrived in the States, these letters betray his innocence, humility and hopefulness, and thus the bittersweet compromise of his immigrant life.
