The Assassin's Song [Hardcover]

M.G. Vassanji (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 21, 2007

The magnificent new novel from the award-winning author of The In-Between World of Vikram Lall (“This beautiful novel . . . is proof that fictional truth can illuminate an epoch in history like nothing else”—The Boston Globe).

In the aftermath of the brutal violence that gripped western India in 2002, Karsan Dargawalla, heir to Pirbaag—the shrine of a mysterious, medieval sufi—begins to tell the story of his family and the shrine now destroyed. His tale opens in the 1960s: young Karsan is next in line after his father to assume lordship of the Shrine of the Wanderer, and take his place as a representative of God to the multitudes who come there. But he longs to be “just ordinary”—to play cricket and be part of the exciting world he reads about in the stacks of newspapers a truck driver brings him from all across India. And when, to his utter amazement, he is accepted at Harvard, he can’t resist the opportunity to go finally “into the beating heart of the world.”

Despite his father’s epistolary attempts to keep Karsan close to traditional ways, the excitements and discoveries of his new existence in America soon prove more compelling, and after a bitter quarrel he abdicates his successorship to the ancient throne. Yet even as he succeeds in his “ordinary” life—marrying and having a son (his own “child-god”), becoming a professor in suburban British Columbia—his heritage haunts him in unexpected ways. After tragedy strikes, both in Canada and in Pirbaag, he is drawn back across thirty years of separation and silence to discover what, if anything, is left for him in India.

A story of grand historical sweep and intricate personal drama, a stunning evocation of the physical and emotional landscape of a man caught between the ancient and the modern, between legacy and discovery, between the most daunting filial obligation and the most undeniable personal yearning—The Assassin’s Song is a heartbreaking ballad of a life irrevocably changed.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The tension between India's centuries-old spiritual traditions and contemporary religious militancy drives this memorable, melancholy family saga by two-time Canadian Giller Prize–winner Vassanji (who won for The Book of Secrets and The In-Between World of Vikram Lall). Karsan Dargawalla is destined from boyhood to succeed his father and his father's father as avatar of Pirbaag, a 13th-century Sufi shrine. As the novel unfolds in fits and starts, Karsan rejects his spiritual inheritance and decamps for Harvard in 1970, against his chagrined father's wishes. The three decades of stubborn self-exile that follow represent a sorrowful generational rift between father and son that ends when Karsan returns home after his ascetic father's death, announced at the book's opening. Though Sufism is a Muslim tradition, Karsan's father considered himself neither and both Muslim and Hindu, and we, says Karsan at one point, are respected for that. Yet Karsan finds the shrine destroyed by a mob of Hindu hard-liners, while his younger brother, Mansoor, militantly calls himself a Muslim and may be involved in Islamist terrorist activities. Frequent shifts in time and perspective (including flashes of the shrine's early history) heighten Vassanji's evocative depiction of India's ongoing postcolonial tumult, mournfully personalized by the fate of the fractured family at the novel's heart. (Aug.)
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From The New Yorker

This resplendent novel traces the path of Karsan Dargawalla, who is brought up, as generations of his forefathers have been, to be the "gaadi-varas, the successor and avatar" of a seven-hundred-year-old Sufi shrine in Gujarat, a mausoleum of Muslim origin but for centuries open to all religions. Karsan, rebelling against "the iron bonds of history," leaves for Boston and Canada, though he ultimately returns to India to "research, recall, and write about" his abandoned heritage. Vassanji eloquently details the sufferings of Karsan’s family as the price of his individual freedom, but suggests that this abandonment was necessary, and that tradition, in the face of India’s "ancient animosities," must be engaged with critically and in the context of the wider world.
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Product Details

• Hardcover: 336 pages
• Publisher: Knopf (August 21, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1400042178
• ISBN-13: 978-1400042173
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.5 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,835,994 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

M G Vassanji (www.mgvassanji.com) was born in Kenya and raised in Tanzania. Before going to Canada in 1978, he attended MIT and the University of Pennsylvania, where he specialized in theoretical nuclear physics. From 1978-1980 he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Atomic Energy of Canada, and from 1980 to 1989 he was a research associate at the University of Toronto. During this period he developed a keen interest in medieval Indian literature and history, co-founded and edited a literary magazine (The Toronto South Asian Review, later renamed The Toronto Review of Contemporary Writing Abroad), and began writing stories and a novel. In 1989, with the publication of his first novel, The Gunny Sack, he was invited to spend a season at the International Writing Program of the University of Iowa. That year ended his active career in nuclear physics. His contributions there he considers modest, in algebraic models and high spin states. The fact that he was never tenured he considers a blessing for it freed him to pursue his literary career. In 1996, Vassanji was made a fellow of the Indian Institute of Advanced Study in Shimla, where he visited again in 2010 as visiting professor.
If pressed, Vassanji considers himself African Asian Canadian; attempts to pigeonhole him along communal or other lines, however, he considers narrow-minded and malicious.

His work has appeared in various countries and several languages. He is winner of the Giller Prize (1994, 2003) for best novel in Canada; the Governor General's Prize (2009) for best work of nonfiction; the Harbourfront Festival Prize; the Commonwealth First Book Prize (Africa, 1990); and the Bressani Prize. The Assassin's Song was also shortlisted for India's Crossword Prize. He is a member of the Order of Canada.
He lives in Toronto, and visits East Africa and India often.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Light's my middle name, too, March 24, 2008

By 

Richard LeComte "richlec" (Tuscaloosa, AL) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Assassin's Song (Hardcover)

This novel is a prime example of how the most specific of stories can have the most universal meaning. Vassanji brings to life a small piece of India -- a shrine to a Sufi mystic -- and the experience of a boy who grows to manhood full of doubts about his father's beliefs and his longing to see the world. What son has not gone through this with his father? The relationship between Karsan and his brother also resonates deeply with men who have younger brothers -- and the tensions that arise when they follow different paths, even as the eternal bonds of brotherhood bring them together.

These universal struggles -- father and son, brother and brother -- are set against the fascinating backdrop of Indian nationalism, the deadly Hindu-Moslem conflict and the story of a medieval Sufi mystic whose life and teaching are shrouded in tragedy. All the while, we're aware that the Sufism as practiced by the father -- the Avatar -- sets the family apart, and Karsan feels the apartness no matter where he goes, either to a Christian school in India, to Harvard, to Canada or back to India. Are all these differences really just illusion, and if so, why do people persist in preserving them? Vassanji does a wonderful job of putting the reader inside Karsan's life thanks to effective description, a gripping plot and wonderfully drawn, tragic characters, from Karsan's movie-going mom to the truck driver who opens Karsan's world to the MIT student with whom Karsan falls in love.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars One man's painful struggle to maintain balance, October 28, 2008

By 

Armchair Interviews (Minneapolis, MN) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Assassin's Song (Vintage Contemporaries) (Paperback)

Imagine your life being planned for you without considering your feelings. Imagine being denied the opportunity to explore your talents because they conflict with this plan. Unfortunately we all bear this burden at some point in our lives. The extent differs, but the burden is there nonetheless.

The Assassin's Song is narrated through Karsan Dargawalla who is heir to the 700-year-old shrine of a 13th century Sufi Nur Fazal. The shrine is in Gujarat, India. It is expected that Karsan, like his father and his ancestors before him, will be keeper of the shrine dispensing blessings and wisdom to all those who visit, regardless of their race, caste or religion. Karsan has an opportunity to move away from the restricted life at the shrine and explores the world outside. Later, he returns to the shrine to become its next Saheb (the role his father played before him, and the role he rebelled against).

The book begins with Karsan at the shrine after his parents are dead, the shrine is destroyed, and his brother has become a militant Muslim and is wanted by the authorities for some unknown crime. Karsan says, "I, the last lord of the shrine of Pirbaag, must pick up the pieces of my trust and tell its story... ." Thus the book begins at the end and through flashbacks it pieces together the life of Karsan Dargawalla as he sees it. Interspersed are chapters that tell the tale of Nur Fazal (also known as the Wonderer). Could it be to show the imperfect symmetry between the lives of Nur Fazal and Karsan?

The narrative is not poetic but contains simple truths. Karsan's teleological question is "Do we always end up where we belong?" As are questions of duty, faith, and self-awareness. It seems that there isn't one resounding truth, but a plethora of small complexities that envelope the characters - with all their contradictions. This book requires patience, empathy, and curiosity. The glossary does not offer a complete list of Indian words used through the text. The story is slow to start, but picks up about halfway through.

The book explores the conflict between ancient loyalties and modern desires through Karsan Dargawalla's painful struggle to maintain a fine balance between the earthly and the ethereal.

Armchair Interview says: The story is about cultural balance.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Harvard years are the best part, July 7, 2008

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algo41 "algo41" (philadelphia, pa United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Assassin's Song (Hardcover)

In this novel Vassanji attempts to convey an appreciation of the holy man tradition in India, while writing the story of a man who rebels against a life serving this tradition, instead becoming an English professor in Canada. In structure, there are parallels between this novel and Vassanji's "The In-Between World of Vikram Lall" (which I loved): both consist largely of a character looking back on his life, but, almost as a surprise to the reader, an important part of each character's life occurs after the period of reflection. Historical events play a role in both novels; here it is the ethnic massacres which are also a part of the Indian tradition, euphemistically referred to as riots. Surprisingly to me, some occurred long after Indian independence, without state authorities acting to suppress them.

This is a successful, ambitious novel, but not as enthralling as "The In-Between World of Vikram Lall". Having said this, it is easier to deal with politics than the spiritual, and Vassanji does succeed in making Karsan's final life choice credible. He also makes the breakup of the marriage credible, but I would like to have heard from his wife, as a married woman, more; as a minor criticism, why didn't they double park to get their boy's drug since both were in the car, instead of spending so much time looking for a parking place? Karsan's childhood friends are not developed even as minor characters. Conversely, Karsan's coming of age during his Harvard years is done beautifully and is the best part of this novel.