The City Son
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
Set in Samrat Upadhyay’s signature and timeless Nepal, The City Son offers a vivid portrait of a scorned woman’s lifelong obsession with revenge and the devastating ramifications for an impressionable young man.
Acclaimed and award-winning author Samrat Upadhyay—the first Nepali-born novelist writing in English to be published in the West—has crafted a spare, understated work examining a taboo subject: a wife’s obsession with her husband’s illegitimate son. When Didi discovers that her husband, the Masterji, has been hiding his beautiful lover and their young son, Tarun, in a nearby city, she takes the Masterji back into her grasp and expels his second family. Tarun’s mother, heartsick and devastated, slowly begins to lose her mind, and Tarun turns to Didi for the mothering he longs for. But as Tarun gets older, Didi’s domination of the boy turns from the emotional to the physical, and the damages she inflicts spiral outward, threatening to destroy Tarun’s one chance at true happiness. Potent, disturbing, and gorgeously stark in its execution, The City Son is a novel not soon forgotten.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
After learning that her husband the Masterji, a tutor living and working in a nearby city has a secret second family, Didi packs up her two young sons and meets the conflict head-on, forcing her way into Masterji's urban home. Before long, she has staked claim and evicted the beautiful but troubled Apsara and her preteen son, Tarun. But as Apsara spirals into deep depression, Didi takes a strong interest in Tarun, who visits on weekends, and this interest turns both physical and psychological. Tarun grows into a young man, yet he cannot escape the grip of Didi, who molests him weekly, latching onto his every sexual desire and manipulating his thoughts. And as Apsara dips further into melancholy and mental distress, Didi supplants her as Tarun's sole mother figure. Author Upadhyay (Arresting God in Kathmandu) tells his story with simple and direct prose. Though Apsara and Tarun find refuge with wealthy Mahesh Uncle, who takes them in and trains Tarun to be his business prot g , the young man cannot shake his past to fully grasp prosperity. Close third-person perspective wanders from character to character, and though the book loses some of its focus by the end (at which point it's following the exploits of Tarun's discarded wife), most of the multicharacter narration adds dramatic depth.
