Call number
FIC IRV
Collection
Genres
Publication
Random House (1994), Edition: 1st, 633 pages
Description
Fiction. Literature. Thriller. Humor (Fiction.) HTML:A Hindi film star, an American missionary, a pair of twins separated at birth, a diminutive chauffeur, and a serial killer collide in a riotous novel by the author of The World According to Garp �??His most entertaining novel since Garp.�?��??The New York Times Book Review �??A Son of the Circus is comic genius . . . get ready for [John] Irving's most raucous novel to date.�?��??The Boston Globe �??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 Daruwalla 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 media clashing with ancient cultures, of broken sexual boundaries.�?��??New York Newsday �??His most daring and most vibrant novel . . . The story of circus-as-India is told with gusto and delightful irreverence.�?��??Bharati Mukherjee, The Washington Post Book World �??Ringmaster Irving introduces act after act, until three (or more) rings are awhirl at a lunatic pace. . . . [He] spills characters from his imagination as agilely as improbable numbers of clowns pile out of a tiny car. . . . His Bombay and his Indian characters are vibrant and convincing.�?��??The Wall Street Journal �??Irresistible . . . powerful . . . Irving's gift for dialogue shines.�?��??Chicago Tribune BONUS: This edition contains an e… (more)
User reviews
LibraryThing member Glorybe1
Unusual subject matter, an Indian doctor, who lives in Canada but writes film scripts for a mega star in India and who just loves everything about the Circus! It doesn't come much stranger than that. Dr Daruwalla doesn't feel at home anywhere, so feels out of water wherever he goes. He goes back to
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India every year to his apartment, goes to his old club The Duckworth club for a taste of old India, but this year there is a murder, which harks back to one that took place over 20 years ago. Dr Daruwalla's journey towards finding the culprit, takes us through some very strange neighbourhoods indeed, and we meet some less than wholesome characters, but the book is somehow captivating and you just have to keep on to the end. Another very good read, with a quriky plot. Great I really liked it1 Show Less
LibraryThing member presto
Now a Canadian citizen, Dr Farrokh Daruwalla lives and works in Canada but spends some time each year in his place of birth, Bombay, and it is in Bombay and India that we spend our time with him. He maintains his own apartment there with a staff, and pursues his interest in the dwarfs who work in
As we would expect with John Irving the story is far from straight forward, and includes in addition to the dwarfs, the low life of Bombay including beggars and prostitutes, actors and film stars, gays, transsexuals and other variations, twins, a handsome Bombay film star as much hated as he is loved, and an unusually honest police officer among others. Much of the action centres around the Duckworth Club, a very respectable club with a twenty year waiting list for members. But bringing everything together is a murder that proves to be more than an isolated case.
Farrokh, a family man now in his late fifties, becomes involved with the murders, he has a connection with the first, and he is there when the latest occurs, and his penchant for writing detective stories ensures his involvement.
The Son of the Circus I consider one of Irving's best efforts. Initially I must admit I did not find it immediately involving, but once we got beyond the circus and met met some of the other characters I was completely drawn in and found it captivating, with a number of very endearing characters - along with one or two villains.
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the circuses; and it is in the circus that is seems we might be spending most of our time - but the action does move elsewhere, and often back in time.As we would expect with John Irving the story is far from straight forward, and includes in addition to the dwarfs, the low life of Bombay including beggars and prostitutes, actors and film stars, gays, transsexuals and other variations, twins, a handsome Bombay film star as much hated as he is loved, and an unusually honest police officer among others. Much of the action centres around the Duckworth Club, a very respectable club with a twenty year waiting list for members. But bringing everything together is a murder that proves to be more than an isolated case.
Farrokh, a family man now in his late fifties, becomes involved with the murders, he has a connection with the first, and he is there when the latest occurs, and his penchant for writing detective stories ensures his involvement.
The Son of the Circus I consider one of Irving's best efforts. Initially I must admit I did not find it immediately involving, but once we got beyond the circus and met met some of the other characters I was completely drawn in and found it captivating, with a number of very endearing characters - along with one or two villains.
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LibraryThing member sunqueen
One of my favorite John Irving books. Totally captures the spirt of Indian culture, with his unique plot twists.
LibraryThing member itbgc
I really tried to like this book as it sounded like it would be terrific, but I could not get interested in it. Too many details. It seemed like certain thoughts were repeated, and repeated, and repeated. . .
After 70 pages, I decided not to waste any more time on it. There are too many better
After 70 pages, I decided not to waste any more time on it. There are too many better
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books out there to read. Show Less
LibraryThing member DWHoel
This was such a long book that sometimes it seemed that Mr. Irving got lost and had to repeat details. Perhaps he thought that he needed to spoon feed reminders to me in case I couldn't remember a setup from earlier pages.
LibraryThing member izzynomad
funny and bizarre, I like it! Dr. daruwalla has no country (but keeps going to india to take blood from dwarves) and no religion, until a transexual bites his big toe while he sleeps. The rest is history.
LibraryThing member izzynomad
bizarre, funny, random, and unbelievably creative- Dr. Daruwalla is a man with no country and no religion, who keeps being drawn back to India to take blood from circus dwarfs. with a few secrets up his sleeve, he participates in the investigation of a transsexual serial killer when the life of his
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bollywood acting-stepson is threatened. it's about people who don't belong anywhere, for people who don't belong anywhere and like to read about other people who don't belong anywhere. Show Less
LibraryThing member heidilove
as much as i love irving, i just couldn't get into this one
LibraryThing member CarlisleMLH
I like Irving enough that I was extremely disappointed in this book! I'm ashamed I read as far as I did before I quit! Life is too short to waste any time on trash! I hate this book so much I was tempted to burn it, except that I can't bring myself to burn a book! What was Irving thinking? I have
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to assume that it must be full of severe sarcasm that I simply don't grasp. Otherwise, this book is surely worthless! Show Less
LibraryThing member libraryhermit
I read a cluster of about 6 or 7 novels by John Irving over a period of 10 years and this was just one of them. (This is my first John Irving review on LibraryThing.)
After reading a mix of unfavourable and favourable reviews below, the effect was to start to dampen my former untempered enthusiasm
While reading this and other John Irving books, one of the themes that I latched on to the most was the traumatic event in the life of a young person that catches him or her before he or she gets the power to cope with adult events and responsibilities. I guess that is really what happens to all of us. It is the suffering through a death or a personal attack or some unprecedented act of violence that cuts many of our childhoods short and throws us pell-mell into adulthood.
For a dwarf, the biological event that happens is at conception, but the impact of it on his or her life when trying to find a place in society is the trauma that usually makes life nasty and unbearable, or at the very least, extremely challenging. Similarly with the idea of sexual deviance, I believe that biologically there is a full range of possibilities that should develop normally without any external pressure from society, family,, and other sources of hangup anxiety. But when young people, disposed biologically, emotionally, aesthetically, or through a simple act of volition, toward transexual orientation, encounter a society that just cannot let people decide independently what to do with their lives, is it any wonder that things really start to get chaotic and contentious.
Society, go ahead and have your opinions and ideas that you love to promote, but equally promote the idea of individual choice.
By looking at a society somewhat removed from our North American society, the pathos of societal constraints placed on disadvantaged persons is even stronger. But I am sure that John Irving has a lesson for us: beware, North American reader--or reader from anywhere for that matter. Your society is hemming you in and you can barely escape the pervasive pressure to conform and do things that go against your most fundamental inner beliefs and desires.
After reading a mix of unfavourable and favourable reviews below, the effect was to start to dampen my former untempered enthusiasm
Show More
for John Irving. While reading this and other John Irving books, one of the themes that I latched on to the most was the traumatic event in the life of a young person that catches him or her before he or she gets the power to cope with adult events and responsibilities. I guess that is really what happens to all of us. It is the suffering through a death or a personal attack or some unprecedented act of violence that cuts many of our childhoods short and throws us pell-mell into adulthood.
For a dwarf, the biological event that happens is at conception, but the impact of it on his or her life when trying to find a place in society is the trauma that usually makes life nasty and unbearable, or at the very least, extremely challenging. Similarly with the idea of sexual deviance, I believe that biologically there is a full range of possibilities that should develop normally without any external pressure from society, family,, and other sources of hangup anxiety. But when young people, disposed biologically, emotionally, aesthetically, or through a simple act of volition, toward transexual orientation, encounter a society that just cannot let people decide independently what to do with their lives, is it any wonder that things really start to get chaotic and contentious.
Society, go ahead and have your opinions and ideas that you love to promote, but equally promote the idea of individual choice.
By looking at a society somewhat removed from our North American society, the pathos of societal constraints placed on disadvantaged persons is even stronger. But I am sure that John Irving has a lesson for us: beware, North American reader--or reader from anywhere for that matter. Your society is hemming you in and you can barely escape the pervasive pressure to conform and do things that go against your most fundamental inner beliefs and desires.
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LibraryThing member rolyaty
Enjoyed this book by irving as well. Great book, different subject matter. I love India, and enjoy such a different book out of one of my favorite authors. Great characters, good plot, nicely paced book.
Good read.
Good read.
LibraryThing member bookCelt
The hand imagery (A Prayer for Owen Meany) is resurrected in this work set in India. Irving (or rather, his researchers) did the homework on this one.
LibraryThing member SimoneA
As with (almost) all the Irving books I have read, I cannot exactly pinpoint what I love so much about this book. I guess he just has a writing style that makes me want to be in the world he creates. Or it's the fact that the characters in this book are just so absurd that you can't help yourself
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but be curious as to what crazy things will happen next. Show Less
LibraryThing member thorold
People keep telling me to read Irving, but up to now I've never really got into one of his novels. I picked this one up on holiday and made the effort to stick with it: I'm not completely convinced, but it was probably just about worth finishing.
I found it rather long and rambling, but with patches
I found it rather long and rambling, but with patches
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of very engaging detail. Research is clearly one of Irving's strengths, but he doesn't seem to be good at discarding material he doesn't need. Of the big plot threads, the one about emigration and deracination wasn't particularly interesting, but I did enjoy the way the book plays around with the conventions of crime fiction and with the way in which the narratives we construct about other people can come back and affect our and their lives. Show Less
LibraryThing member JosephKing6602
I continue to be a fan of John Irving.....the stories just go 'on-and-on' and somehow, i always want to keep reading.
LibraryThing member AliceAnna
A little slow for me to get into, but quite entertaining once I did. Dr. Durawalla was very endearing once I got used to him Nancy, Patel, Rahul and the inimitable twins Dahor and Martin, were wonderfully drawn characters. The plot was a little weak as far as I was concerned, though.
LibraryThing member busterrll
Never finished Never cared
LibraryThing member LyndaInOregon
I almost bailed out after the first hundred pages of this book, and should have followed that inclination. When one keeps dozing off and dropping the book on one's foot, it's seldom a good sign.
There are, undeniably, some very funny moments here, generally based on cultural misunderstandings. The
There's a murder mystery, and a subplot about twins separated at birth, and frequent reminders about the toilet habits of homeless people in large cities. There's a side trip through the world of "Bollywood" movies, and the existential dilemma of a man born to one culture but reared in another, who tries to maintain his balance with a foot in each.
But mostly, there are just words -- thousands of them, pouring over the defenseless reader like a tsunami. In the end, perhaps, it's best just to stay away from the literary shoreline here.
There are, undeniably, some very funny moments here, generally based on cultural misunderstandings. The
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"American hippy" girl's taxicab ride into Bombay from the airport is laugh-out-loud funny, and scattered moments like this (along with Irving's gift for creating memorable characters) kept me slogging along well after any real interest in the plot fizzled out.There's a murder mystery, and a subplot about twins separated at birth, and frequent reminders about the toilet habits of homeless people in large cities. There's a side trip through the world of "Bollywood" movies, and the existential dilemma of a man born to one culture but reared in another, who tries to maintain his balance with a foot in each.
But mostly, there are just words -- thousands of them, pouring over the defenseless reader like a tsunami. In the end, perhaps, it's best just to stay away from the literary shoreline here.
Show Less
LibraryThing member mmodine
SPOILER WARNING
I haven't read all of Irving's work, but this is my second favorite after A Prayer for Owen Meany. As other reviewers have said, Irving's style can be a bit plodding and the apparent folding together of different time periods can leave the unprepared reader breathless. Once you get
The main character, Dr. Farrokh Daruwalla, is an orthopedist and the anonymous screenwriter behind a series of Bollywood crime dramas (dramas with singing and dancing, of course, because Bollywood). His surname turns out to be symbolic. The word “wallah,” coming from the Hindi suffix “-vala,” indicates one who performs a specific function or, interestingly, one who is connected to a particular place. The doctor, then, as the writer of the Inspector Dhar movies, performs the service of creating and maintaining Dhar. This suffix then turns ironical, as Daruwalla has never felt at home anywhere.
Don't read this expecting a lot of circus action. That's like coming to Jurassic Park and expecting cool dinosaurs. Maybe a chapter or two is in the circus proper and that's it. The disconnect between the title and the plot, however, is part of the novel's genius. This is the second ironic twist to the doctor’s name. For when, as a screenwriter, he ventures out from the genre he is familiar with, has a difficult time settling on a title. He finally chooses Limo Roulette, which is a very small portion of the screenplay he's writing.
Dr. Daruwalla is a perfect Irving character: at home but not at home, searching for some kind of meaning. In many ways, he is like John Wheelwright, the narrator and lead in Owen Meany. As Daruwalla has also chosen Toronto for his permanent residence, there are even a couple of near-misses at creating a shared universe for the two novels. Grace Church on-the-Hill and Bishop Strachan School, both of which are connected to Wheelwright, appear briefly in the epilogue. Daruwalla is even said to have spent a considerable amount of quiet time in Grace Church; Wheelwright preferred the weekday services at the Church for their sparse and quiet attendance.
There are a significant number of similarities between Circus and Owen Meany: a main character (Daruwalla and Wheelwright) floating on the margins of Christianity; a mystical character (Martin Mills and Owen Meany) obsessed with a sense of mission that doesn’t turn out like he thought it would; a parent killed violently (Daruwalla’s father by a car bomb, Wheelwright’s mother by an errant baseball); and mysterious fathers (the twins John D. and Martin Mills and Wheelwright). There are probably some others but this is already getting longer than it needs to.
Even with these similarities, however, Owen Meany and Circus are not the same novel. This leads me to one of the many great phrases I underlined as I was reading. This is found on p 548 of the paperback: “Instead of listening to the numbers or enduring the Jesuitical provocations of Martin Mills, Farrokh chose to tell a story. Although it was a true story—and, as the doctor would soon discover, painful to tell—it suffered from the disadvantage that the storyteller had never told it before; even true stories are improved by revision.” Circus, published five years after Owen Meany, may be a revision of the former. Perhaps this question need not be answered. After all, as a minor character realizes on p 473, perhaps not everything needs to be understood in order to follow a plot. One final word: the deadnaming of the transgender character “the second Mrs. Dogar” has not aged well. However, Irving has often treated themes of gender and sexual non-conformity in his works so maybe this is yet another place where the true story has undergone revision.
I haven't read all of Irving's work, but this is my second favorite after A Prayer for Owen Meany. As other reviewers have said, Irving's style can be a bit plodding and the apparent folding together of different time periods can leave the unprepared reader breathless. Once you get
Show More
past this, though, this is a delightful read.The main character, Dr. Farrokh Daruwalla, is an orthopedist and the anonymous screenwriter behind a series of Bollywood crime dramas (dramas with singing and dancing, of course, because Bollywood). His surname turns out to be symbolic. The word “wallah,” coming from the Hindi suffix “-vala,” indicates one who performs a specific function or, interestingly, one who is connected to a particular place. The doctor, then, as the writer of the Inspector Dhar movies, performs the service of creating and maintaining Dhar. This suffix then turns ironical, as Daruwalla has never felt at home anywhere.
Don't read this expecting a lot of circus action. That's like coming to Jurassic Park and expecting cool dinosaurs. Maybe a chapter or two is in the circus proper and that's it. The disconnect between the title and the plot, however, is part of the novel's genius. This is the second ironic twist to the doctor’s name. For when, as a screenwriter, he ventures out from the genre he is familiar with, has a difficult time settling on a title. He finally chooses Limo Roulette, which is a very small portion of the screenplay he's writing.
Dr. Daruwalla is a perfect Irving character: at home but not at home, searching for some kind of meaning. In many ways, he is like John Wheelwright, the narrator and lead in Owen Meany. As Daruwalla has also chosen Toronto for his permanent residence, there are even a couple of near-misses at creating a shared universe for the two novels. Grace Church on-the-Hill and Bishop Strachan School, both of which are connected to Wheelwright, appear briefly in the epilogue. Daruwalla is even said to have spent a considerable amount of quiet time in Grace Church; Wheelwright preferred the weekday services at the Church for their sparse and quiet attendance.
There are a significant number of similarities between Circus and Owen Meany: a main character (Daruwalla and Wheelwright) floating on the margins of Christianity; a mystical character (Martin Mills and Owen Meany) obsessed with a sense of mission that doesn’t turn out like he thought it would; a parent killed violently (Daruwalla’s father by a car bomb, Wheelwright’s mother by an errant baseball); and mysterious fathers (the twins John D. and Martin Mills and Wheelwright). There are probably some others but this is already getting longer than it needs to.
Even with these similarities, however, Owen Meany and Circus are not the same novel. This leads me to one of the many great phrases I underlined as I was reading. This is found on p 548 of the paperback: “Instead of listening to the numbers or enduring the Jesuitical provocations of Martin Mills, Farrokh chose to tell a story. Although it was a true story—and, as the doctor would soon discover, painful to tell—it suffered from the disadvantage that the storyteller had never told it before; even true stories are improved by revision.” Circus, published five years after Owen Meany, may be a revision of the former. Perhaps this question need not be answered. After all, as a minor character realizes on p 473, perhaps not everything needs to be understood in order to follow a plot. One final word: the deadnaming of the transgender character “the second Mrs. Dogar” has not aged well. However, Irving has often treated themes of gender and sexual non-conformity in his works so maybe this is yet another place where the true story has undergone revision.
Show Less
LibraryThing member estellen
This one didn't grab me at all.
LibraryThing member emanate28
The only book that I've read so far by John Irving that I truly liked & enjoyed. (I've read Life According to Garp, Prayer for Owen Meany, 1 or 2 others that I can't even remember...)
LibraryThing member DKnight0918
Third time is a charm. Took me a few months but I finally finished it. I love Irving and everything I've read by him.
Pages
633
ISBN
0679434968 / 9780679434962