That Summer in Paris
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- € 6,49
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- € 6,49
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From the award-winning author of Babyji comes an utterly seductive tale of an aging writer whose involvement with a young woman forces him to face the eternal question of love.
Prem Rustum, a famous but reclusive Indian author, has spent most of his life consumed with writing. Feeling the weight of his seventy-five years, he resolves to put down his pen and live a little. He ventures online where he finds Maya, an aspiring young novelist who has boldly posted her admiration for Prem's work. Captivated by her charm, Prem decides on impulse to join her in the City of Light. During the summer that follows, Maya brings Prem into direct confrontation with his mortality and desires through the awakening of new longings and the rekindling of old ones. Written with sureness of style and tempo, That Summer in Paris reflects on how art informs love, and love, literature.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Dawesar's keen, witty third novel opens on an author feeling defensive about the dirty bits of his oeuvre not sorry they're dirty, but sorry they're not better received: "Even the French repeatedly poked fun at Prem's passage on drinking a lactating woman's milk." Prem Rustum, a Nobel Prize winning Indian amalgam of Henry Roth (Prem slept with and wrote about his sister, Meher) and Salman Rushdie, is 75, and he's ready to try again at both love and the writing of it. When he searches for his own name on a dating Web site and finds 20-something Maya, whose ad reads "Write like Prem Rustum, think like Prem Rustum... be Prem Rustum," he seizes the chance and follows her from New York to Paris, where she has a writing fellowship. Both of them draw great pleasure and creative power from the long seduction that follows, and over the course of the book Dawesar (Babyji) shows off her own superior dirty-bit skills in plenty of sex scenes and daydreams. She also firmly entwines readers in Prem and Maya's family lives and creative meditations. The breezy tempo of Dawesar's assured prose belies the gravitas of her subject, conveyed through believable dialogue between people who are serious about art, ideas, reading and writing.
