Dr. Farrokh Daruwalla, reared in Bombay by maverick foes of tradition, educated in Vienna, married to an Austrian and long a resident of Toronto, is a 59-year-old without a country, culture, or religion to call his own...The novel may not be about 'India', but Irving's imagined India, which Durawalla visits periodically, is a remarkable achievement - a pandemonium of servants and clubmen, dwarf clowns and transvestite whores, missionaries and movie stars. This is a land of energetic colliding egos, of modern medial clashing with ancient cultures, of broken sexual boundaries.
Reader from Oxford, MS:
I have...read all of Irving's book, and usually find each one completely satisfying... So, once A Son of the Circus was published, I could hardly wait to read it! I tried, several times, but I always seemed to lose interest about ten pages in. You know when you find yourself re-reading the same paragraph over and over but you still can't remember what you have just read? That's the trouble I had with this book. After owning it for five years, I finally sat myself down one summer and literally forced myself to read the whole thing cover to cover, to at least give it a fair chance. Hoping perhaps it just had a beginning. No such luck. This is one Irving I will not be reading again and again. What happened is all I can ask!!
Reader from Baltimore, MD:
This was one of the best books I've read in a long time. I picked it up at a bargain-basement sale a few years ago and never got up the courage to read it. Well, I just finished it after a week of non-stop vacation reading. I had a hard time putting it down! As a first generation Indian-American, I could empathize with Dr. Daruwalla's feelings of isolation and why he was uncomfortable trying to fit into two different countries and cultures. Irving truly captures the flavor of India in this novel--both bad and good. I was amazed at his powers of observation--the maniacal taxi drivers, the chaos in the streets of Bombay, the beggars, the Hindi film scene, the interpersonal relationships at the upper-crust Duckworth club. The many plots and sub-plots were so cleverly intertwined that they held my attention throughout the 600+ pages.
CRITICS' REVIEWS:
Donna Seaman
Booklist
...Irving has perfected his impressive narrative skills and launched into unexpected territory: a murder mystery rife with antic sexuality and set in the seething city of Bombay, home of India's film industry (Bollywood), hoards of street urchins and prostitutes, and the last tattered remnants of British colonialism. Irving achieves an almost Dickensian richness with his cast of vivid and eccentric characters, loopy yet converging plot lines, moral underpinning, and predicaments both hilarious and wrenching.
