In Anita Nair's warm and imaginative first novel, middle-aged bachelor Mukundan returns to his native Indian village and is haunted by the past. Determined to conquer old ghosts, Mukundan decides to restore his childhood home and hires One-Screw-Loose Bhasi, an outcast painter, to oversee the renovations. A practitioner of a unique style of healing, Bhasi sets about mending his troubled friend, but the durability of Mukundan's transformation into a better man is soon called in to question.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
At the heart of Anita Nair's first novel, The Better Man, there's a haunted house--with ghosts lurching around dark hallways and pushing the living down staircases. The cursed construction is in Kaikurussi in central India, and our protagonist, Mukundan, grew up there with his tyrant father and meek, apologetic mother. As the story opens, this frustrated middle-aged writer finds himself returning home, once again taking up residence in his dull, oppressive childhood village. He doesn't want to be there. He drinks rum and fears the dark.
Enter One-Screw-Loose Bhasi, a painter of houses and self-proclaimed healer who sees in Mukundan an opportunity for redemption and friendship. In much of the book Bhasi directly addresses his newfound companion:
Tell me, Mukundan. Tell me what it is that haunts you so. Tell me of the darkness that clouds your life. Tell me why you fold your handkerchief in eight precise squares. Tell me why it is that every strand of coconut fibre has to be heaped in one place when I finish with it. Tell me how it is that you have chained yourself to the clock.Anita Nair has a great gift for suspense; from the beginning of The Better Man, she hints at profound losses in her characters' pasts, losses that are gradually revealed as the novel progresses. Class antagonisms crop up throughout, threatening to destabilize the village's quiet existence. A warning for language-minded readers: the book's metaphors can be clumsy and strained to bursting ("the sun took a deep breath and began its morning chores"). But fans of fiction from India, who crave passage into that exotic world, will find it highly rewarding. --Ellen Williams --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Publishers Weekly
All's well that ends well in Kaikurussi, the storybook Indian village that serves as the setting for Nair's charming debut novel. Bhasi, the village house painter, tells part of the tale. Driven out of his teacher's position in another village a decade earlier when he got himself mixed up in a disastrously miscalculated romantic entanglement, Bhasi hopped on a random bus and ended up in Kaikurussi. Since then, he has happily functioned as the village eccentric and off-hours healer. As a healer, he meets his wife, Damayanti, and his path crosses that of Mukundan Nair. Middle-aged Mukundan departed the village at age 18 to escape his tyrannical father, Achuthan, and left his mother to deal with her violent, adulterous husband. Now, having retired from his job as a factory manager, he's come back to the house he inherited when his mother died--Achuthan lives across the street with his mistress--only to find it haunted by her vengeful spirit. Practicing a folk version of psychotherapy, Bhasi manages to restore Mukundan's self-confidence, so much so that Mukundan takes up with Anjana, a beautiful young schoolteacher. Anjana is not fully divorced yet, but Mukundan is willing to risk the social faux pas, until he is invited to Power House Ramakrishnan's house for a meeting of the Community Hall Committee. Power House is the richest man in the village, having won the lottery, and he wants to seize Bhasi's land to put up a community hall. Will Mukundan, flattered by Power House's attention, betray his friend and girlfriend? Nair has the magical ability to make all of her readers feel, briefly, like Kaikurussi villagers in this humorous, imaginative and gracefully written novel. Agent, Laura Susijn. (June)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
High-school drama in disguise,
By Manola Sommerfeld (California) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Better Man (Paperback)
I enjoyed the descriptions of daily life in an Indian village. Other than that, this book had a lot to dislike. For starters, the language was too contrived: "...she let him grope the curves of her breasts and tease the nubs into nibbly nuts..." "Then in Bhasi's eyes, Mukundan saw the star he had sought in the heavens shine and burn". The storyline was equally aggravating. This could have easily been the plot of a high-school movie: newcomer (Mukundan) is scared and wants nothing more than belong. He makes friends with a dweeb (Bhasi), who is genuinely concerned about him. He finds true love (Anjana). But when the "in" clique starts paying attention to the newcomer, he mistreats those who care about him. Through a series of events, he eventually realizes what a rat he's been and makes ammends.Honestly, i'd rather watch or read the high-school version!
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Who is this for?,
This review is from: The Better Man: A Novel (Hardcover)
With many a fiction being released with exotic corners of the world in the backdrop, `The Better Man' has the entire recipe for a potential blockbuster in that category, but for some reason fails to emulate even a `God of Small Things'. The reason, I believe lies in the basics of writing: the author failed to identify the audience of the book. With the globalization taking the literary world on stride, it is hard, but still important for the producer (author) to clearly identify the consumer (reader) for success (effective communication).The story of Kaikkurussi has all the ingredients for an interesting netherworld tale. There is the curious Bhasi who can look into the minds and cure them with the help of exotic herbs and pure commonsense. There is the protagonist Mukundan, who discovers and rediscovers himself with the help of Bhasi. There are the images of death, tyranny, submission, defiance and ultimate tragedy of the various other characters with the Kerala social setup in the background. But the author fails to build the necessary background for a person unfamiliar with the society to digest all this. At the same time, for a native, the book does not provide anything new or exciting as there have been similar books written before, albeit in the local vernacular. It appears Anita Nair had the former category of readers in mind. I would point to Marquez's Macondo (One Hundred Years of Solitude) as the epitome of the stories of other lands, factual or fictitious. It is amazing how skillfully and seamlessly Marquez weaves the strands of the land, people, society, culture and times of Macondo with a strong story line in the foreground. May be that is a little unfair a benchmark to new writers like Nair.
1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Entertaining account of village life in India,
By A Customer
This review is from: The Better Man: A Novel (Hardcover)
Set in the Malabar region of Kerala, this story shows how Nair can weave imagination with realism. Mukundan Nair, the protagonist returns to his village to be overshadowed by his tyrannical father. His fear of his father does eventually diminish with the end of the book as he emerges as the better man. But on the way, he enlists the help of One-screw-loose Bhasi who plies him with herbs and at one point has him sitting in a clay urn which is in the shape of a woman's womb, so that he can be born again without his emotional hangups! Mukundan is a man whose character is under attack. He can succumb to greed and flattery, but he doesn't. He wins the respect of the villagers without loosing his own self-esteem. Nair is a natural storyteller but what I like is that she doesn't turn India into exotica.
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