Man on Fire
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- $17.99
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
John Lock has fled the quiet desperation of his life in England--decades wasted in a meaningless job, a marriage foundering in the wake of loss, and a terrible secret he cannot bear to share with his wife--and has come to India to meet his destiny.
A destiny dressed in a white karate suit and sporting an impressive moustache.
John has come to offer his help to a man who has learned to conquer pain, a world record-breaker who specializes in feats of extreme endurance and ill-advised masochism. Bibhuti Nayak has survived forty-three kicks to the unprotected groin in ninety seconds, three forty-pound slabs of concrete smashed over his groin with a sledgehammer, and thirty-one watermelons dropped on his stomach in one minute from a height of more than thirty feet. His next record attempt--to have fifty baseball bats broken over his body--will be the crowning moment in a career that has seen him rise from poverty to become a minor celebrity in a nation where standing out from the crowd requires tenacity, courage, and perhaps a touch of madness.
John is welcomed into Bibhuti's family and into the color and chaos of Mumbai, where he encounters Ping-Pong-playing monks, a fearless seven-year-old martial arts warrior, and an old man who longs for the monsoon to wash him away. As he and Bibhuti take their leap of faith together, John sets out to rewrite a brave end to a life poorly lived.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In his second novel, Kelman (Pigeon English) focuses on the spiritual crisis of an Englishman who travels to the village of Navi Mumbai, in India, in order to kick-start his sputtering life. Desperately seeking meaning, John Lock decides to leave his ailing wife behind for a short time to go to India and join acclaimed pioneer of extreme sports Bibhuti Nayak, who is attempting to end his career with a final world record breaking 50 baseball bats over his body. Interwoven flashbacks reveal that Bibhuti already endured a record 43 kicks to his unprotected groin in 1998 and claimed another record in 1999 for 1,448 sit-ups in one hour, but when John sees three slabs of concrete broken over Bibhuti's groin in a television performance, it incites his "sense of the magnificent," leaving him with pure desire: "I wanted what he had. He shimmered and crackled and the world bent to his will." Lock weathers a deluge of surprising revelations and eventually must contend with his own spiritual beliefs. The kinship between these two different men is endearing, and Kelman's novel is a joyful offering.