My Beloved Life
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- €6.99
Publisher Description
'This profound book is full of lives whose beauty lies in the wholeness of their telling.' – Salman Rushdie
'Kumar's late father’s life breaks like a slowly cresting wave over the sad and joyful ground of this story . . . Always deeply human; the heart is everywhere in these pages . . . beautiful, truthful fiction.' – James Wood, The New Yorker
A novel that tells the story of modern India, through the life of one apparently ordinary man, from the death of Gandhi to the rise of Modi.
Jadunath Kunwar's beginnings are humble, even inauspicious. His mother, while pregnant, nearly dies from a cobra bite. As his life skates between the mythical and the mundane, Jadu finds meaning in the most unexpected places. He meets the sherpa who first summited Everest. He befriends poets and politicians. He becomes a historian. And he has a daughter, Jugnu, a television journalist with a career in the United States – whose perspective sheds its own light on his story.
All the while, currents of huge change sweep across India – from Independence to Partition, Gandhi to Modi, the Mahabharata to Somerset Maugham, cholera to COVID – and buffet both Jadu and Jugnu's lives.
Amitava Kumar's remarkable My Beloved Life explores how we tell stories and write history, how the lives of individuals play out against the background of historical change, and how no single life is without consequence.
'A novel of vaulting ambition and tenderness, about how histories, both personal and national, are built, refracted and revised.' – Katie Kitamura, author of Intimacies
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Kumar (A Time Outside This Time) unfurls a majestic Indian family saga in successive bildungsroman narratives of a father and daughter. Jadu Kunwar, an 80-something history professor in Patna, remembers the moment his mother gave birth to him in 1935 in their small village. Bitten by a cobra during the delivery, she later points to her survival as an auspicious sign for Jadu's strength ("All the terrors that life held could not destroy you"). The remainder of Jadu's story underscores that sentiment as it recounts his coming-of-age, marriage, and the birth of his daughter, Jugnu. While Jugnu is a young girl in the 1960s, Jadu temporarily leaves Patna to attend UC Berkeley on a Fulbright scholarship, citing as his inspiration sherpa Tenzing Norgay, who climbed Mt. Everest to move from "misery to prosperity." In the novel's second part, set after Jadu's death in 2020, Jugnu, who is now a journalist in Atlanta, attempts to write his obituary. The occasion prompts her to reexamine the trajectory of her father's life from country boy to city man, and reflect on how it mirrors her own quest to reinvent herself by leaving Patna to study at Emory University. A stunning final chapter sheds new light on their stories with a revelation about their genealogy. Kumar excels at blending mysticism and a refined cosmopolitan perspective, and the twinned stories offer an intriguing testament to the book's epigraph, which comes from Janet Malcolm: "No story is told exactly the same way twice." Readers will find much to savor.
