Customer Reviews

Blue Bedspread

5 star:		(17)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(9)
1 star:		(21)

 

 

As an American who coems to India every few months, I am a keen follower of the new burst of English writings here. However this book certainly left a bad taste. I think it was dragging, boring and plain pretentious. God knows how the publishers managed the reviews. The entire story is confusing. U need an Aspirn after page 6. And I can swear that all comparisons with Carver are misplaced. There is no building up of a tale or characterisations. Even the sex is unerotic, seedy and false. What remains in your mind after you complete it is the feeling that you have been conned. Maybe the author needs encouragement, being a new one. However, I dont think this should be at the readers cost !

This book is painful to read -- the style is contrived and the language is, in equal measure, pretentious and corny. What explains all those great reviews? Danmed if I know. The publishers have done a tremendous job marketing this book. Jha does cut a nice "pretty boy" image (just look at his pic. on the inside jacket) and incest - gratuitous or otherwise - seems to sell.

Save your money, don't spend it on this one. Use it help other young talent instead.

This book is difficult to read and is pure pretense. I believe that Jha is a new writer, but I guess he has slipped up badly. People outside India may make some sense out of the whole thing, but for me this was pure disappointment. There are structural problems as well as a problem of credibility in the entire story; Such subjects require more senstivity. I think Jha should put in more effort in his next book as well as be more honest and less showy.

What a ghastly book! Dreadful story and overly written. The only character worth remembering is the family's faithful housemaid. And the ending - puhleeze! Like you couldn't see the big secret from ten miles away. I didn't want to give it even one star; maybe amazon should rethink their rating system.

This is the first book by an Indian author I have read that is fresh, completely original in its voice and style. At times it gets confusing but within a few pages it hits you that this is deliberate, that this book is about confession, about someone offloading a secret. I have read the reviews in the Indian press and the foreign newspapers and this is one book which you will either fall in love with or just don't understand. Critics have been sharply divided and I think this is the strength of the book: that it evokes such strong emotions. The other unique thing is that for the first time someone is writing about modern day realities, without any frills and adjectives, and this may be one reason why many people in India are uncomfortable with the book since it doesn't portray India as they have come to read. This book is lyrical and cinematic and there are some images that I shall never forget: especially the one about the lonely man who has nothing for comfort except the news on CNN and an attractive unknown woman in Bosnia. Or the radio commentary on the India-England match and how this is the only time that the father is happy so the children are safe.

Jha is a writer of great promise and natural talent and The Blue Bedspread is a true original.

Having read "The God of Small Things", "A Fine Balance", and "Interpreter of Maladies", I felt the urge to continue on the road to better understanding the genre of Indian authors. This small novel is both disturbing and sad, but is also written in a beautiful manner - almost compelling the reader to continue even though the air of pending shock hovers between the lines.

One evening, a middle-aged man gets a phone call from a hospital saying that his sister has dies in childbirth, the child had been arranged for adoption but the adoptive family cannot take the child (a baby girl) until the following day. The man agrees to take the child for the night and during the course of the night (sleepless for the man) he proceeds to write non-stop to the child, weaving the stories of the family from whom she comes. As she sleeps and occasionally wakes and cries - lying on a blue bedspread, the stories he scribbles out furiously fall into patterns by person: mother, father, sister, and brother. And they are not particularly lovely tales - in fact, they are full of the painful things that families sometimes do to one another under the guise of "love".

It can be tiring, sometimes, to read book after book in which families and supposed loved ones abuse others, usually the women, of the household. Although I realize that this is the way of the world - there is a certain exhaustion that comes from reading book in which you spend emotional time wishing that people wouldn't be so damn mean to other people - including their own children. Unlike some other reviewers, I did not find much redemption in the characters, only pain, and a good deal of sadness.

I really wanted to "get" this book, however, the author failed to deliver. The inconsistencies are hard to overcome and his writing style is disjointed. Bonding with the characters is futile as they are bland and lifeless. I must say, certain passages were riveting but it wasn't enough to carry the book.

The Blue Bedspread is a beautifully written book, calling to mind the exquisite prose of Arundhati Roy. It is, however, somewhat bizarre, and that's why I did not give it the full five stars. I'm not one who demands that everything be spelled out for me clearly when I'm reading, but there were times as I was reading The Blue Bedspread that I was just plain confused. I wouldn't have minded the confusion if the author had cleared it up later, but he never did.

But enough about that. The book is a fast read, easily read in one sitting. The plot is held together by a middle aged bachelor who retrieves his newly orphaned niece from the hospital, her mother -- his sister -- having died while giving birth. During the night that follows, the man writes down a collection of stories for the baby so that she can read them when she's older and know who she is and where she came from. The stories are written from different points of view, with no proper names given to anyone, and focus mainly on the childhood of the boy and his sister.

I see that the reviews are quite mixed. People either loved the prose or hated the book because of it's unorthodox style and saddenning subject matter. Reader, it's up to you. If you don't mind a challenge, give the book a try. If you like things pretty cut and dry, this book isn't for you.

Raj Kamal Jah delights in the subtle creepiness of this tale--his narrator, worthy of a Poe story, is strange, mysterious, and utterly unreliable. The reader is immediately immersed in an eerie unfamiliar world, with only this bizarre, broken soul as guide.

What both entrances and annoys equally in this book, is the format. It begins with a mystery: Who is the narrator? What happened to his sister? What is this baby's story? In peculiar and somewhat erratic chapters to follow, the reader is meant to put the stories of these characters together--a device that seems to be popular amongst other tales of India, and is in other hands, more successful. Often Raj Kamal Jah is heavy-handed, the device becomes too apparent, and the result is highlighted in the worst of the negative reviews seen below.

For the most part, I found the book extremely engaging. I was entranced despite my infrequent complaints about discordant passages and the errant chapter. There are some truly remarkable images that are impossible to forget; beauty and violence, ecstasy and tragedy so intertwined as to become unrecognizable as merely one or the other.

For a new writer to elicit so many distinct and impassioned reviews is pretty impressive. Perhaps the potential power of this writer as witnessed in the first few chapters makes the occasional stumble all the more frustrating. It is the potential alone that makes this book worth your best shot.

I found the story very pretentious and at times there seemed to be an attempt to make things seem bigger than they are. It's a pretty boring story which seems to aspire to take on epic proportions which it does not deserve. If this book was published after 'The God of Small Things' , i really can't help but think of it as a blatant imitation of sorts which lacks momentum and literary beauty of the former.