The Impressionist

Hari Kunzru's Great Invention

A grand, sprawling, extravagant, intensely lyrical first novel by a gifted young English writer. Life gets awfully bad very quickly for fifteen-year-old Pran Nath Razdan when his maid gives him the bad news: His father isn't the rich Indian Pran thought he was, but rather an Englishman. Pran Nath, who was formerly spoiled, conceited, vain, and entirely impossible, becomes, suddenly, homeless. He's forced to start his life anew, and begins creating new identities for himself. The prose here is lofty, often to the point of outrageousness ("Pran dreams of a land made of stacked chapatis and curds, populated by vegetable girls with okra fingers and aubergine breasts and saucy looks in their green-pea eyes"), but Kunzru is clearly a writer of such massive talents, and his novel is so impressive in a way that few first novels are, that his maximalist tendencies are forgiven. A work so rich, vibrant, and richly imagined that you can smell the incense.

Adrienne Miller is Esquire's literary editor.

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