Out came a thought and then another...

I like author websites because they provide a one-stop spot for author biography, bibliography, interviews, press blurbs and so on. So convenient.

I dislike author websites because they provide a one-stop spot for author biography, bibliography, interviews, press blurbs and so on. Why did you steal my puzzle?

In the case of Naeem Murr, it is a good thing that he has a website because there aren't too many other resources on the web that help.

The Perfect Man, Murr's third novel and Booker 2006 longlistee, appears to be a coming of age novel though, as this review suggests, it is not merely that.

Murr chooses a young boy called Rajiv Travers, his half-Indian name and his dark skin eternal reminders that he is born of an abandoned Indian mother, to take the reader to Pisgah in the 1950s, "in a flood year, by the night train, on tracks raised by men then called Negroes out in the darkness". Rajiv's arrival in that small town is a deliberate telescoping of the wide world beyond, its distant limits marked by India, where he was born, by England, where he was left by his father with an uncle and a most unwilling aunt, and by Australia, where his father now is looking for more adventures. On the night of his arrival, Rajiv's second uncle, to whom he is now being tossed, commits suicide. The woman with whom the uncle was living, enigmatic Ruth, a tireless writer of old-fashioned romances, in a strange decision agrees to keep Rajiv with her.
The boy's gentle humour begins to earn him friends, overriding, for the most part and more easily than would have seemed possible, the difference in skin colour, and finally a childhood begins to take root in this new place.
At one level, The Perfect Man is a very competent coming-of-age novel, exploring friendship, love, heartbreak and the chilling dawn of adult wisdom in Rajiv and his group of friends. But it is also a book about arrival and departures, about developing roots in a place, particularly as an outsider.

Posted by Echo/Lavanya on Thursday, September 14, 2006 at 6:35 PM | Permalink