Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard by
Kiran Desai

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Sampath Chawla was born into a family a bit off kilter, to a mother not quite like her neighbours, in a town not quite like other towns. After years of failure at school, failure at work, of spending his days dreaming in the tea stalls and singing to himself in the public gardens, it does not seem as if Sampath is going to amount to much. "But the world is round," says his grandmother, "wait and see! Even if it appears he is going downhill, he will come up out on the other side. Yes, on top of the world. He is just taking the longer route." No one believes her. Until Sampath climbs a Guava tree in search of a life of peaceful contemplation - and becomes unexpectedly famous as a hermit.
Kiran Desai was born in India in 1971, and was educated in India, England and the United States. This, her much heralded first novel, has been serialised in The New Yorker, included in the Vintage Book of Indian Writing, and has found publishers all around the world.

Here's what the members of the Reading Group based at our Raheny branch library think of Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard:

A most humorous book with a serious undercurrent. The work is a study of human and animal behaviour and proves there is very little to choose between the two. Sampath Chawla is the son of a rather eccentric mother living in a town full of bizarre people. Considered a failure in school and in the work place, he decides to leave home and seek freedom and tranquillity up a tree in the Guava Orchard. His peace is short-lived when crowds arrive proclaiming him a Guru. His father, seeing this as a business potential, encourages the idea. When a band of monkeys discover the pleasures of alcohol and invade the orchard, Sampath finds himself in the centre of a hullabaloo. He is quite tolerant of the monkeys but to him, the human behaviour is intolerable. This is a most enjoyable read.
(Member of Raheny Library Reading Group)

I had been looking forward to reading this novel which I had anticipated as being from the same school of magical realism as that of Salman Rushdie and others. Sure enough, the main protagonists were all slightly off kilter and the writing full of joie de vivre. When the main character Sampath, the feckless only-son of a middle-class family who have fallen on hard times, decides to live in a tree a as a way of avoiding his responsibilities, the story seems to take off. In fact the metamorphosis from a dim-witted young man to a guru who drops pearls of wisdom to his growing throngs of admirers is extremely funny, since his oblique aphorisms are so reminiscent of two or three world-famous gurus of the 1970's, who it was believed by the gullible, bestowed enlightenment on them. The arrival of a troup of monkeys suggests more allusions to the laziness of us mortals, who would rather believe in the meanderings of a 'chancer' than use our brains to work out the meaning of life for ourselves. However, whatever symbolism the monkeys were intended to invoked petered out and the farcical machinations of a large cast of local VIP's all vying with each other to put a stop to the marrauding troup took over. And the novel came to a sudden end. Dissatisfyingly.
(Member of Raheny Library Reading Group)