If You Are Afraid Of Heights [Paperback]

Raj Kamal Jha (Author)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Jha, executive editor of the Indian Express and author of the critically acclaimed novel The Blue Bedspread, returns with a dark, impressionistic collage about collective history and the unseen connections between people and events. Divided into three nearly discrete stories, the novel follows a set of intertwined characters across a blighted Indian city, in which the poor and the rich live segregated, vastly different lives. Amir, a letter writer for the postal office, meets and falls in love with wealthy Rima after a freak tram accident. A newspaper reporter investigates the death of a young girl in a small town and begins to remember her own childhood trauma. When townspeople start killing themselves, a girl tries to protect her parents from a similar fate. How these stories are connected is not immediately obvious; Jha writes in a style that is at once dramatic and unsentimental, relying heavily on the suspenseful ellipsis of mystery to propel readers forward. "There are a thousand and one reasons in this city for children to cry," Amir says, a statement that echoes throughout the book. Like The Blue Bedspread, Jha's second novel contemplates incest and domestic violence through the screen of repressed memory, but it is more self-consciously allegorical, and while rich in poetry, it lacks some of the emotional weight of its predecessor.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist

Jha's second novel weaves together three seemingly unrelated tales, bound by fragile ties of dreams and memories. A tram accident in an unnamed Indian city brings together a man and woman from totally different circumstances: he lives in a small apartment with cockroaches, water-pump shutoffs, and power outages; she lives in a high-rise aptly called Paradise Park, where the air-conditioning is "like the wind . . . when the monsoon breaks" and windows of telescopic glass offer glimpses of the sea 500 miles away. Both have dreams of a child crying; then she disappears. A reporter visits a small town where a young girl was raped and murdered, her body found in the local canal. She also experiences weird dreams. Finally, a young girl worries about her parents' demise during a spate of neighborhood suicides. In prose replete with poetic imagery, Jha keeps his readers on the edge, never sure of what is real and what is magic, of what is happening now and what is memory. Deborah Donovan
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 293 pages
• Publisher: Picador; Open market ed edition (December 31, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0330427369
• ISBN-13: 978-0330427364
• Product Dimensions: 6.8 x 4.4 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A wedding of past to present, September 4, 2004

By 

Luan Gaines "luansos" (Dana Point, CA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: If You Are Afraid of Heights (Hardcover)

In the first prologue of two, Jha hints at the mysterious nature of the tales to come, a reminder that things are always more complicated than they appear and infinite layers reside between vision and reality. To get the full impact of this novel, one must suspend belief and heed the distant chords of memory.

In a skillful blending of three interconnected stories of contemporary India, Jha's characters are beautifully nuanced: the man and woman who fall in love after he is involved in an accident, the female reporter in search of truth about the brutal murder of a young girl in a red dress; and finally, a young girl in a red dress, speaking from her own unique perspective. With elegant language that is both visual and visceral ("He tastes the taste of broken sleep"), the author is the pied piper of imagination, drawing concentric circles, attaching the characters within a fragile web of familiarity.

This is a complex novel, written by a man who is not afraid to delve into the deepest recesses of the human heart, past daily facades, into the places where dreams dwell and fears bloom like dark flowers. Wealth alone provides safety from the world at large, while poverty waits patiently to strike the unsuspecting; survival is played out against a background of nature's excesses, a paucity of luxury and the infinite tedium of daily struggles.

Jha peers into the teeming throng of humanity with an omniscient eye, carefully selecting his protagonists, intersecting the details of their lives, then merging into the unknowable. Memory mixes flawlessly with reality in this cautionary fable, where innocence is captured in the form of a young girl in a red dress, crying softly, poised on a precipice of poverty, fear and fate. Perhaps it is the incessant rain that so perfectly captures these characters, distorting their desires, reflecting them back to the world. The narrative is strangely comforting, a journey through life's corridors, sometimes nightmarish, often familiar with yearning and irrepressible shards of hope. Luan Gaines/2004.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "If words fail you..don't worry, I shall fill in the blanks", September 26, 2004

By 

Mary Whipple (New England) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: If You Are Afraid of Heights (Hardcover)

A haunting novel which takes the reader to new heights on the back of a crow, Jha's latest novel tells three mysterious and unsettling stories from three points of view, all with overlapping imagery. Neither realistic nor magical, Jha creates a whole new realm here, the world that exists between dream and nightmare, and between imagination and memory, which all of us inhabit for most of our everyday lives. Motifs (a crow, a red dress, a brown dog, a house with a balcony that looks like a frown) appear and reappear throughout the three different sections, with each part recreating the inner world of a different character.

In the first section, Amir, a young man who has been injured by a tram, is nursed back to health by Rima, a young woman who brings him back to her apartment, gets him a doctor, and makes sure that all his needs are met so that he can recuperate in peace. In the second section, Mala, a young newspaper reporter, has gone to a distant village to investigate the death of a child, who has drowned in a canal after being raped. The final section returns to the city where a neighborhood has suffered a rash of suicides. A young child is worried that her parents might kill themselves and confides in a friend, who promises to follow her father and mother.

Two italicized prologues and a brief conclusion summarize the novel thematically, while the first person narratives illustrate the sensual responses of Amir, Mala, and the child to what is going on around them and provide insights into their emotional states. The novel requires the reader to form hypotheses about what is happening and how the characters connect, with the author confirming the connections and the meaning of the novel in the conclusion, which draws all the visual details and motifs together.

Jha emphasizes the process by which we all bring order and "sense" to our lives, how we live our dreams, and how we deal with our fears and our memories. The reader must be committed to letting this impressionistic novel unwind, accepting the mysteries that exist, as they do in our own lives, without worrying about the characters or the direction of the "plot." The author fills in any blanks at the end. Unique in its approach and fascinating in its construction, this novel captures the essence of its characters' lives and connects directly with the reader's own inner life. In this, it achieves a universality rare in fiction. Mary Whipple

2.0 out of 5 stars A Review From an "Average" Guy..., December 29, 2009

By 

Hermitian - See all my reviews

This review is from: If You Are Afraid of Heights (Hardcover)

This book is what many would call very "literary."

It is beautifully written in many ways, but in the end it is slow, boring, and tells incomplete tales with little plot.

The smallest of inconsequential side items are described with infinite detail, while the basics of communicating meaningful information is ignored.

Read it for the writing, read it to experience a different culture, but don't read it for the story.