John Irving - A Son of the Circus

EXOTIC AND ENGROSSING.
Chicago Sun-Times

His new book is his boldest novel yet. The reader is swept along by a torrent of vigorously dramatized incidents, jostled by a crowd of instantly vivid characters. The language has an energy that keeps pace with the fecundity of invention.

The New York Times Book Review (front page)

Theres a lot going on in Irvings expertly dovetailed and foreshadowed story. A Son of the Circus offers a satisfying mix of evil and goodness pursued in different ways. It debunks both easy hope and easy cynicism. Unlike most popular novelists, Irving knows how muchand how littleto make of a serial killer.

Los Angeles Times Book Review

John Irving is never content with giving us something as meager as a novel. He wants us to know the whole story, everything, not just the thin slice of the world usually known as fiction. A writer with the courage to follow this difficult journey while also exploring issues of poverty, racism and disease in a novel so full of humor is a writer to be treasured.

The Times (London)

[A] LUSH, LABYRINTHINE TALE.
The Miami Herald

The miracle of A Son of the Circus is that all the twists and elaborations make sense, that in the whirl of improbable characters and unlikely events Irving makes us believe these are real people trying to live decent lives.

The Seattle Times

There is an old fashioned charm about John Irving. His style is clear, intelligent and undemanding, his narratives discursive and lively. With a wholesome relish for grotesquerie and eccentricity, he produces solid, ambitious fables you actually do read when you take them on holiday.

The Daily Telegraph (London)

A heroic attempt at creating an imaginative order, with multiple plots, numerous characters and complex manipulations of time large doses of suspense, intriguing detail finely honed comic characterizations and a prose style that never loses momentum.

The Toronto Star

OUTRAGEOUS JOHN IRVINGS MOST AMBITIOUS WORK. US Magazine

A mercurial writer, he produces a comic strip of effects: bleak, effervescent, sentimental, philosophical. Irving handles this incarnadine combination of farce and horror with high-speed skill, creating a compulsively readable book. He can seduce or repel.

The Guardian (London)

In this marvelously entertaining novel, Irving has given us a version [of India] that is simple only in the timeless literary pleasures it offers. And in the process, he has invented a world that all his readers can both comprehend and love. [A] glorious book A Son of the Circus gives us a breadth of vision, variety of characters and range of concerns that evoke his immortal The World According to Garp.

S hashi T haroor
San Jose Mercury News

FUNNY AND FASCINATING

Irving is at the height of his considerable literary powers in this comic tour de force. If you liked The World According to Garp, The Hotel New Hampshire, or A Prayer for Owen Meany, youre going to be happy. Irvings novels burst with stories, characters, arguments, oddities and images that help us define the world we live in.

Playboy

Irvings subplots reproduce themselves as if by magic. A host of themthe meeting of twins separated at birth, circus dwarfs bent on rescuing street urchins, the murder of a drug dealer twenty years before in 1969, mistaken paternity, and the search for Christian beliefswirl around the main story line: the capture of a serial killer murdering prostitutes along Bombays Falkland Road.

New York Newsday

A page-turner that leaves the satisfied reader happily exhausted Set against a backdrop as astonishing as the dazzling diversity of India itself, John Irvings vast new novel is at heart the poignant tale of a good man displaced by circumstances and yearning for home.

The Anniston Star

BREATHTAKING

A SON OF THE CIRCUS is a wild ride. Farrokh Daruwalla is one of Irvings most charming creations to date.

Vogue

A practitioner of the nineteenth-century form of novel, Irving manages to keep his plot moving briskly as he navigates his characters through the teeming, fly-ridden, cloying landscape of India. Along the way, he stops to meditate on the accidental nature of life, the oft-times fragile nature of religion and the incidental nature of nationalism. There is more, of course, much more. And like a true son of the circus, John Irving manages to juggle all of these elements with sure hands, putting on a show worthy of the craftiest ringmaster.

The Kansas City Star

Bigger and more fantastic than any of his previous books Irving combines Indian circuses, dwarfs, twins separated at birth, a transsexual serial killer, and questions of cultural identity, ideology and religious faith with the storytelling skill of a twentieth-century American Dickens.

Modern Maturity

Also by John Irving
Published by Ballantine Books:

BOOKS
Until I Find You
The Fourth Hand
My Movie Business
A Widow for One Year
Trying to Save Piggy Sneed
A Son of the Circus
A Prayer for Owen Meany
The Cider House Rules
The Hotel New Hampshire
The World According to Garp
The 158-Pound Marriage
The Water-Method Man
Setting Free the Bears

SCREENPLAYS
The Cider House Rules

A Ballantine Book
Published by The Random House Publishing Group
Copyright 1994 by Garp Enterprises, Ltd.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an inprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to North Point Press, a division of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, for permission to reprint excerpts from A Sport and a Pastime by James Salter. Copyright 1967 by James Salter. Reprinted by permission of North Point Press, a division of Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

Ballantine and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

www.ballantinebooks.com

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 93-44750

eISBN: 978-0-307-42393-1

This edition published by arrangement with Random House, Inc.

v3.1_r1

This novel isnt about India. I dont know India. I was there only once, for less than a month. When I was there, I was struck by the countrys foreignness; it remains obdurately foreign to me. But long before I went to India, I began to imagine a man who has been born there and has moved away; I imagined a character who keeps coming back again and again. Hes compelled to keep returning; yet, with each return trip, his sense of Indias foreignness only deepens. India remains unyieldingly foreign, even to him.

My Indian friends said, Make him an Indiandefinitely an Indian but not an Indian. They told me that everywhere he goesincluding where he lives, outside Indiashould also strike him as foreign; the point is, hes always the foreigner. You just have to get the details right, they said.

I went to India at the request of Martin Bell and his wife, Mary Ellen Mark. Martin and Mary Ellen asked me to write a screenplay for them, about the child performers in an Indian circus. Ive been working on that screenplay and this novel, simultaneously, for more than four years; as of this writing, Im revising the screenplay, which is also titled