That Summer in Paris [Paperback]

Abha Dawesar (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 14, 2007

From the award-winning author of Babyji comes an utterly seductive tale of an aging writer whose involvement with a young woman forces him to face the eternal question of love.

Prem Rustum, a famous but reclusive Indian author, has spent most of his life consumed with writing. Feeling the weight of his seventy-five years, he resolves to put down his pen and live a little. He ventures online where he finds Maya, an aspiring young novelist who has boldly posted her admiration for Prem's work. Captivated by her charm, Prem decides on impulse to join her in the City of Light. During the summer that follows, Maya brings Prem into direct confrontation with his mortality and desires through the awakening of new longings and the rekindling of old ones. Written with sureness of style and tempo, That Summer in Paris reflects on how art informs love, and love, literature.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Dawesar's keen, witty third novel opens on an author feeling defensive about the dirty bits of his oeuvre—not sorry they're dirty, but sorry they're not better received: "Even the French repeatedly poked fun at Prem's passage on drinking a lactating woman's milk." Prem Rustum, a Nobel Prize–winning Indian amalgam of Henry Roth (Prem slept with and wrote about his sister, Meher) and Salman Rushdie, is 75, and he's ready to try again at both love and the writing of it. When he searches for his own name on a dating Web site and finds 20-something Maya, whose ad reads "Write like Prem Rustum, think like Prem Rustum... be Prem Rustum," he seizes the chance and follows her from New York to Paris, where she has a writing fellowship. Both of them draw great pleasure and creative power from the long seduction that follows, and over the course of the book Dawesar (Babyji) shows off her own superior dirty-bit skills in plenty of sex scenes and daydreams. She also firmly entwines readers in Prem and Maya's family lives and creative meditations. The breezy tempo of Dawesar's assured prose belies the gravitas of her subject, conveyed through believable dialogue between people who are serious about art, ideas, reading and writing. (June 20)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Booklist

Dawesar's third novel is a contemplative, sensual, and literary melange exploring the ways in which love and sex affect one's artistic muse. Booker and Nobel Prize winner Prem Rustum, 75, believes that he has written his last novel and, "in the absence of women, sex, and further mountains to scale," considers moving back to India. Prem visits an Internet chat room and meets Maya, a grad student obsessed with his novels. When they meet in person, Maya feels "like a very young flower receiving the first rays of the vernal sun." They travel to Paris, Maya on a fellowship to write her novel, and Prem, ostensibly, to visit a writer friend. There Prem flashes back to his most profound and problematic love, his incestuous relationship with his sister, which ended only with her marriage. As his feelings for Maya deepen, he longs for one more relationship of "pure feeling." Dawesar's artistic reflections occasionally lean toward the pedantic, but ultimately she delivers a provocative tale of love and the literature it inspires. Deborah Donovan
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 352 pages
• Publisher: Anchor (August 14, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0307275450
• ISBN-13: 978-0307275455
• Product Dimensions: 5.3 x 0.7 x 8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,847,238 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A ride of unaparralled intelligence and sensuality, July 23, 2006

By 

Stanley Hoffman "deadly serious reader" (New York, NY USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: That Summer in Paris: A Novel (Hardcover)

THAT SUMMER IN PARIS is a literary gift on so many levels I barely know where to begin. It treats the nature of art, the soul of the writer, the joys of platonic sex and sexual sense, the eroticism of food, the despair and the ecstacy of old age, the confusions of youth--in short, life itself--in such intimate and touching ways this reader felt changed in a way he's rarely felt from a novel. The miracle is that a young woman is the author of a book that should rightly have been written by someone twice her age at the least. It is a book of wisdom, sensitivity, and good old-fashioned fun. The theme of the book is a mighty one--the meaning of what it is to be alive in a world of infinite possibility. In the eyes and soul of a 75-year-old writer of great success looking for one last chance at feeling alive we see and deeply feel a methaphor for all our lives. Yet it is such a readable book with such a compelling plot the depth of what it explores hits us unawares. When I finished reading it, I just sat there stunned. I can't imagine a better summer read--and fall and winter and spring-- that both challenges our views of what it is to be human and gives us a renewed sense of life's grandest emotions. It is frightening to consider where Abha Dawesar has yet to go as a writer when she's already created such a masterpiece of prose as this. I LOVED THIS BOOK. God, what a read! Incredible doesn't even come close....

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Yaaawwwwwwwnn, 2.5 Stars, September 14, 2007

By 

Maurice Williams "mauricewms" (Chicago, IL USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: That Summer in Paris (Paperback)

"That Summer in Paris" turned out to be not as hot as I remember; but then again that was my summer in Paris. The novel's premise, coupled with my passion for reading and writing, interested me enough to start the book. The story is about an aging writer and his quest for everlasting love. From New York where he sought the adoration, via the internet, of a young writer enthralled by his talents to Paris where he is the object of the adolescent adulation of girlhood friends, the author explores the intricacies of love and its influence on art and the artist. I made it halfway through the novel but ultimately the story couldn't maintain my interest. Although I enjoyed the aspects of the novel dealing with writerly matters, I found the parts of the story set in Paris and focusing on museum paintings and sculptures quite boring. I labored through half of the novel enjoying spurts of wonderfully erotic writing but ultimately the story moved too slowly for me and the eroticism bordered on perversity in some instances. I mean, Dawesar would have to have made an incredibly creative and powerfully visceral connection with this reader to justify Prem's physical intimacy with Meher. The absence of this connection and the languid pace of the story caused me to give up on "That Summer in Paris".

While I can't recommend this one based on my encounter with the story it appears to have struck a cord with other art and literature enthusiast. Take your chances, you might get as lucky as Prem did in Paris.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Enthralling and Intelligent, July 14, 2006

By 

BookFinds (Boston, MA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: That Summer in Paris: A Novel (Hardcover)

Dawesar's meditation on aging, creativity and passion is a great summer read for anyone interested in the love lives of writers. American writer Maya is an admirer of Prem Rustem, see: Salman Rushdie, and worships the ground he walks on. Rustem is an aging Indian Nobel prize winning novelist, who feels he needs to live life, and not chronicle it. As soon as he makes this decision, he comes across Maya's personal ad on a online dating website and wants to have a meaningful relationship with her. In the past, Prem has only been involved in unhealthy affairs- one of them with his sister, Meher. Soon after they meet, Maya leaves New York and is off to Paris for a writing fellowship and Rustem follows after her. Their May-December relationship is touching and erotic. It's a fine beach read for people who don't want the books to lose their intelligence.