Run and Hide
A Novel
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4.5 • 2 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
"Pankaj Mishra transforms a visceral, intimate story of one man’s humble origins into a kaleidoscopic portrait of a society bedazzled by power and wealth—what it means on a human level, and what it costs. Run and Hide is a spectacular, illuminating work of fiction." —Jennifer Egan, author of Manhattan Beach
Growing up in a small railway town, Arun always dreamed of escape. His acceptance to the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology, enabled through great sacrifice by his low-caste parents, is seemingly his golden ticket out of a life plagued by everyday cruelties and deprivations.
At the predominantly male campus, he meets two students from similar backgrounds. Unlike Arun—scarred by his childhood, and an uneasy interloper among go-getters—they possess the sheer will and confidence to break through merciless social barriers. The alumni of IIT eventually go on to become the financial wizards of their generation, working hard and playing hard from East Hampton to Tuscany—the beneficiaries of unprecedented financial and sexual freedom. But while his friends play out Gatsby-style fantasies, Arun fails to leverage his elite education for social capital. He decides to pursue the writerly life, retreating to a small village in the Himalayas with his aging mother.
Arun’s modest idyll is one day disrupted by the arrival of a young woman named Alia, who is writing an exposé of his former classmates. Alia, beautiful and sophisticated, draws Arun back to the prospering world where he must be someone else if he is to belong. When he is implicated in a terrible act of violence committed by his closest friend from IIT, Arun will have to reckon with the person he has become.
Run and Hide is Pankaj Mishra’s powerful story of achieving material progress at great moral and emotional cost. It is also the story of a changing country and global order, and the inequities of class and gender that map onto our most intimate relationships.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Mishra returns to fiction (after Bland Fanatics, a collection of criticism) with a circuitous story of an Indian man opting out of an ostensibly bright future. Arun Dwivedi, a literary translator, recounts his life to a writer named Alia, who is working on a book about India's new global power brokers with a focus on his former classmates at the cutthroat Indian Institute of Technology in the 1990s. He describes a fractured upbringing with an abusive father and a modest young adulthood after IIT, contrasted with that of two fellow lower-caste friends who went on to great heights. There's "financial wizard" Virendra, who makes a fortune in America, and social climber Aseem, who insinuates himself into high society as a writer. Arun, on the other hand, moves to a small Himalayan village to look after his abandoned mother. After Aseem introduces him to Alia, she invites him on a getaway to Pondicherry, where their relationship turns sexual. While away, Arun's mother dies and he makes an impulsive decision to follow Alia to London. Arun's reflections are nearly sunk by tedious philosophizing about India's place in the early 21st century and the rise of nationalism, but are saved by the searing portraits of purportedly successful Desis. There are plenty of insights, but the rambling structure and navel-gazing narration will tax readers' patience.
