000			01877cam a22002897a 4500
001			3902248
003			OSt
005			20230111150309.0
008			910718t19901988ii 000 1 eng
010			_a 90906860
020			_a9780571151011 (hbk.)
040			_aDLC _cDLC _dDLC
082			_a823.914 CHA
100	1		_aChatterjee, Upamanyu,
245	1	0	_aEnglish, August: an Indian story / _cUpamanyu Chatterjee
260			_aLondon _bFaber and Faber _c1988
300			_a291 p. ; _c21 cm.
500			_aGratis GBP 11.95/-
520			_aAgastya Sen, the hero of English, August, is a child of the Indian elite. His father is the governor of Bengal. His friends go to Yale and Harvard. He himself has secured a position in the most prestigious and exclusive of Indian government agencies, the IAS. Agastya's first assignment is to the town of Madna, buried deep in the provinces. There he meets a range of eccentrics worthy of a novel by Evelyn Waugh. Agastya himself smokes a lot of pot and drinks a lot of beer, finds ingenious excuses to shirk work, loses himself in sexual fantasies about his boss's wife, and makes caustic asides to coworkers and friends. And yet he is as impatient with his own restlessness as he is with anything else. Agastya's effort to figure out a place in the world is faltering and fraught with comic missteps. Chatterjee's novel, an Indian Catcher in the Rye with a wild humor and lyricism that are all its own, is at once spiritual quest and a comic revue. It offers a glimpse an Indian reality that proves no less compelling than the magic realism of Salman Rushdie and Arundhati Roy.
650		0	_aYoung men _vFiction.
650		0	_aCivil service _vFiction.
650		0	_aCity and town life _vFiction.
651		0	_aIndia _vFiction.
655		7	_aHumorous fiction. _2gsafd
655		7	_aBildungsromans. _2gsafd
942			_2ddc _cBK
999			_c109183 _d109183