"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."
[From the New York Newsday]
His most recent novel, possibly his most bizarre, and certainly among my favorites. If Charles Dickens had been slightly more cynical and a bit more perverse, A Son of the Circus might have been Dickens' stab at a murder mystery. Instead, it became Irving's.
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