Socialite Evenings [Mass Market Paperback]

Shobha De (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 1, 1998

This novel is about Karuna, a prominent Bombay socialite, who is trying to flee the nightmare of the present by escaping into the past. An unhappy divorce and a succession of sordid affairs have left her bruised and battered and, in an effort to forget, Karuna begins writing her memoirs. As the story of her life unfolds we see how the gauche middle-class girl metamorphoses into a star. This is a novel on Bombay, women and society. This edition is a reprint from 1999.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Indian journalist De's distasteful portrait of Bombay high society regales the reader with rich, bored women seeking amorous adventures (usually leading to their own humiliation), self-absorbed (sometimes gay) men who offer their wives material comfort in exchange for an appearance of propriety, false gurus and glamorous parties that end in violence. Narrator Karuna succeeds in escaping from her drab middle-class life into the upper reaches of wealth and celebrity, passing along the way through a loveless marriage, a disastrous extramarital affair, and courtship by a leading Indian film director, and achieving eventual success and a sense of pride as an advertising copywriter and creator of a TV serial. The wealthy woman burdened with a loveless marriage and an empty life who goes out to discover herself may seem cliched to the West, but perhaps not in India. Yet this first novel, with its flat characterizations and graceless prose, fails either to pointedly depict the social dilemma of women like Karuna, or to effectively satirize the vulgarity of Bombay's nouveau Western aspirations and the cultural and moral dislocation that underlie it.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About the Author

Shobha De has founded and edited three popular magazines: Stardust, Society and Celebrity. She is presently a freelance columnist for several newspapers and magazines, as writing subsequent novels.

Product Details

• Mass Market Paperback: 307 pages
• Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics); 1 edition (April 1, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0140122672
• ISBN-13: 978-0140122671
• Product Dimensions: 7.6 x 5.1 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 2.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,135,447 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Entertaining but Not Reflective of Society, August 7, 2007

By 

Ocean Dweller "oceandweller" (San Francisco, CA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Socialite Evenings (Paperback)

The character Karuna appears to be fashioned on how the author views herself and how she thinks the super-rich live. The latter part is probably pretty much her own imagination without any basis on real life characters.

The story is one of the earliest for the author - may be written at a time when she had not experienced many things in life.

The part where she talks of her middle class background is somewhat credible. Such a society does exist (at least did - about thirty years ago). There are references to the type of radio or the station that the father would listen to etc. This part must have come from experience.

The parts about how the rich live clearly rings hollow and lack depth. Most male characters (except may be her Father) are so one dimensional they couldn't possibly be of a real person. The husband comes across as zero dimensional.

Women are typically insecure or loose or both. Karuna is the only character that has some depth - that too because she is the narrator - albeit a self obsessed one.

There is heavy name dropping - Calvin Kleins, or Carrera sunglasses - which again shows the narrators urge to drop names and betrays her ignorance of how the well off really live (and equal ignorance that the rich may prefer Carrera cars but not the sunglasses). The super rich always live in posh localities - never a mention of things that go into their home.

There are parts of it that is purely funny especially when Karuna is bitchy to her friend Anjali.

Enjoy it for what it is - fiction/fantasy. Not a reflection of the times or mores.

3 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars way too heavy on the Ice Queen bit, April 30, 2001

By 

S. Clark - See all my reviews

This review is from: Socialite Evenings (Mass Market Paperback)

As a story about a young woman's life, the first half of this book is very hard to take. The main character, Karuna, from whose perspective the story is told, speaks of everything in her life with such coldness and cattiness, it's impossible to believe in the authenticity of the story. It is also a very unpleasant experience for the reader to have to share such an emotionally arid experience of such long duration. But, happily, Karuna starts to loosen up a bit and live a more connected life about half way through. And by the time the book ends, Karuna's voice has become comfortable like an old sock. And I suppose she is to be praised for never really totally letting go of her icy self possession throughout.

But the most interesting thing about this book is how much I learned from it as an, admittedly very provincial, American. The poeple of India are very poorly represented in American media, I feel. It think many people in American still think of India as mostly populated with skeletal beggars brushing flies off their eyes with one hand while holding out a begging bowl with the other. This book was a total eye-opener in that respect. Karuna is a very savvy young woman. She is, if anything, too westernized. This book shows that affluent, well educated Indians are not in the least bit shy about moving around in western dominated culture and worldly affairs.

This book was really an amazing, eye opening experience for me. But that was largely due to the fact I am an American. But I would have given this book 5 stars, except the story is fairly flat, monotonous, and as I said above, somewhat unbelievable in it's extreme coldness. It is a fact of human namure that even the most self possessed and domineering person on the planet will still have a number of soft spots for people and things in their lives. The complete absence of any such tender humanity through long stretches of this book make it hard to swallow.

3 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars An elegant & vivid book, March 11, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: Socialite Evenings (Mass Market Paperback)

Well, maybe I'm a little abnormal to think this book is quite great. But to me, it was more interesting than <Bridget's Diary> or John Grisham books.
I am a Korean girl, and even to my North East-Asian eyes, India is a combination of vague & conflicting images, rather than a real country with living people.
This book is powerful to make readers to see India which we can't find in National Geographic or Lonley Planet.
Of course, the writer wrote mostly about the modern hish society of Bombay, but the variety of characters makes a certain harmony of the universe scale.
Well, I'd rather pick another Shobha De book(if she writes on) rather than <Bridget Diary sequels>