The City of Joy (Mass Market Paperback)

by Dominique Lapierre (Author) "HE HAD THE APPEARANCE of a Mogul warrior: thick shock of curly hair, sideburns which met the drooping curve of his mustache, a strong, stocky..." (more)
Key Phrases: other pullers, few paisas, leper clinic, City of Joy, Stephan Kovalski, Mother Teresa (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal
What irony that one of Calcutta's most devastating slums should be known as Anand Nagar, ``the City of Joy.'' By interweaving impressionistic glimpses from the lives of a French priest, a rickshaw driver, and an American doctor, Lapierre creates a searing vision of the struggle for survival, the flashing violence, and the social and cultural practices of the slum. His theme that from human misery can emerge joy might seem to some readers as a bogus acceptance of a terrible evil. Yet Lapierre's narrative slides skillfully in and out of both history and fiction to create an effective but horrible montage of disease, death, and destruction amid elements of charity, hope, and love. The City of Joy should elicit strong reactions from readers. BOMC and Quality Paperback Book Club alternates. John F. Riddick, Central Michigan Univ. Lib., Mt. Pleasant
Copyright 1985 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Review
Exactly halfway through Lapierre's The City of Joy, a missionary priest exclaims, "Bless you, Calcutta, for in your wretchedness you have given birth to saints." It is about several such saints struggling against overwhelming wretchedness that this account of life in the most squalid of Calcutta's slums, Anand Nagar ("The City of Joy"), concerns itself. In the telling, the protagonists find themselves overwhelmed in turn by a love and compassion as transforming and inexplicable as grace. The tale is initially absorbing, constantly disturbing and ultimately uplifting. Anand Nagar, according to Lapierre (who spent three years in Calcutta and Bengal researching the book), has the densest concentration of humans anywhere on earth. More than 70,000 Muslims, Hindus, Christians, Sikhs, Parsis and Buddhists are crammed into an area smaller than two football fields. Their average income is less than 10 cents a day. With one latrine for every 2,500 people and one fountain for every 3,000, sanitation is, to all intents and purposes, nonexistent. And yet, despite the crowding, the poverty, the scorpions, mosquitoes, rats and ordure, "The City of Joy" glows with human feeling. Orphaned children are immediately adopted by neighbors; religious festivals joyously praise a variety of gods; lepers are embraced and cared for; eunuchs (damned in Hindu theology) are revered. Lapierre traces the progress of a handful of idealists through this Indian Inferno-Purgatorio-Paradiso: the rickshaw-puller Hasari Pal; a Polish Catholic priest, Stephan Kovalski; Max Loeb, a young American doctor; Bandona, a beautiful Assamese nurse. Even Mother Teresa makes an appearance at the periphery of the narrative. Their alternating and, eventually, intertwining stories create a tapestry of human suffering, sacrifice and courage. As co-author (with Larry Collins) of such bestsellers as Is Paris Burning?, Freedom at Midnight and The Fifth Horseman, Lapierre knows how to tell a story. Unfortunately, the novelistic approach he has chosen occasionally casts an aura of Puzo or Cartland over individual scenes: ". . .all around them, blows rained down with redoubled savagery." Or "Then they surrendered themselves to pleasure." Often, too, the translation by Kathryn Spink is awkward and inexact. Despite these quibbles, however, The City of Joy is more than welcome in a world that needs such reaffirmations of the human spirit very badly. (Kirkus Reviews) --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Mass Market Paperback: 552 pages
• Publisher: Grand Central Publishing (May 7, 1990)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0446355569
• ISBN-13: 978-0446355568
• Product Dimensions: 6.7 x 4.2 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.9 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars See all reviews (34 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #344,599 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

19 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars True Life and Love in the City of Joy, April 8, 2002

By	Alwyn Lau (Petaling Jaya, Selangor Malaysia) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This is a story of hearts in Calcutta. Dominique Lapierre, world-renowned journalist and author, narrates and interviews the lives and struggles - eventually intertwined - of Hasari Pal (a peasant driven to the city by a drought which devastates his village), Stephan Kovalski (a Polish priest seeking to identify with the poorest of the poor, and getting more than he bargained for in the slums of Anand Nagar) and Max Loeb (a Jewish-American medical grad responding to Kovalski's invitation to help out for a year).

Everything revolves around the 'City of Joy', the name given to the slum of Anand Nagar in the heart of Calcutta. Lapierre's descriptions are fascinating and insightful in their detail and colour as they are horrifying and unbelievably stark in their vividness and actuality. He opens us up to the afflictions, hardships, rituals and occasionally care-free living of lepers, rickshaw pullers, eunuchs, peasants, scrap yard rag-pickers and hovel life in the slum. He explains the intricate and wondrous minutiae of Indian wedding negotiations, festivals, funerals, even toilet rituals; the scheming and inhumanity behind the blood (and skeleton!) donation business, the foetus trade business, the rickshaw business, mafia operations; the sad and almost comical inefficiencies of a Calcutta post-office, hospitals, traffic control; the horrendous adversities brought by floods, droughts, scorching summers, even a cyclone. Along the way we're also treated to an exciting kite-war, fought between child and adult alike along the slum's rooftops, plus a glimpse of Mother Teresa's ministry in the Home for Dying Destitutes beside the Temple of Kali.

For the poor, even their only source of joy - their families and dreams - are vulnerable to separation and shatter.

A family living on a pavement reluctantly and sorrowfully agrees to let their children beg for food when their father can no longer give them food, even after donating blood from his severely under-nourished body (the donation centre extracts surplus blood from him, causing him to faint). The father eventually becomes a rickshaw puller - after his predecessor loses a leg and dies a few days later in hospital - and is overjoyed despite having to run hundreds of miles in the heat and rain, suffer the humiliating treatment meted out by his passengers and people on the street, and risk the loss of his rickshaw from corrupt authorities. A mother seeks to alleviate her family's food problems (she and her husband has to feed four kids - not to mention themselves - with only a handful of rupees a month) by selling her then-unborn baby for experiment purposes. But the operation, performed in a sleazy 'operating room' by even sleazier characters, goes awry. She bleeds helplessly, and the traders take her foetus and relief her of the upfront money she received. Worst of all, she's left for dead, becoming a target for the corpse business. And her family doesn't know and never sees her again. A cyclone destroys an entire area of hovels and fills the streets with excrement, filth and carcasses. A defender of the rights of rickshaw pullers (who live hand to mouth and cannot afford a rise in 'taxes', as opposed to rickshaw owners who live fat, comfortable lives) is shot in the head after a successful campaign; a clinic for lepers is destroyed by thugs with zero-toleration for the non-payment of 'protection money', ridiculously high especially given the extant poverty; a rickshaw puller dives into a row of burning rickshaws to save his 'bread and butter' (confiscated and condemned for profit motives); a father breaks his back to produce a dowry and make wedding arrangements for his daughter and dies of sheer exhaustion in the middle of the ceremony, his body instantly collected by human bone traders.

The list goes on. Yet the book is filled with expressions of awe and sheer emotion by the main characters, through whose eyes we see the acts of selflessness, giving and caring which permeates slum-life, in spite of the numerous tragedies and heartaches experienced. There is just so much sharing going on in the book, even by those who have almost nothing for themselves, you'd suspect that giving is an occasion independent of circumstances and resources. This speaks powerfully to our modern calloused hearts, often desensitized to the poverty and pain of the world (yet strangely overwhelmed by the self-inflicted stress of greed, ambition of urban society). The City of Joy shows us the joy and celebration in the midst of utter destitution, in a world where starvation, sickness and filth (the word-count for 'excrement' is in the dozens) are integral to life. It reveals hope and delight from the simples of things, the barest of providence. And it teaches that in the thick of demonic conditions, hopelessness and tragedy, the greatness and beauty of love shines through.

This book should also be a wake-up call for Christians to be more faithful 'lights' to the world, a reminder that love and self-giving is how we must touch the world. Christ's love, expressed in our compassion, is probably the only form of Gospel having any currency in the slums of the world. Yet how we fall short of Mother Teresa's - and God's - timeless instruction, given to a volunteer regarding a dying man (told midway through the book), "Love him...love him with all your might."

Some of the inhabitants of the City of Joy are role models of devotion and loyalty to what one believes. The numerous prayers and quite thanksgivings of the slum- (and pavement) dwellers reveal a continuous integration of 'religion' and 'daily life' sadly missing in many a Christian. Lapierre narrates, maybe without knowing it, 'true religion' in the story of Hasari Pal and many other Hindus and Muslims in the slums.

The reality of the lives in the City of Joy will be an everlasting reminder of how far and deep the love of God can reach. The City of Joy can show me, if I pay attention, how lovely will be the City of God.

15 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars STORY OF THE UNBREAKABLE HUMAN SPIRIT, January 4, 2006

By	Abhilash R. Nambiar "Abhilash Nambiar" (Seattle, WA USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

No other book I had ever read has ever made me more proud about the fact that I am an Indian or importantly, a human being. The moving story, that the author claims is based on facts is probably based on a true one. What is truly remarkable though, is the fact that this is probably not an unusual story or for that matter even an uncommon one! It happens, more so in India that anywhere else, despite 200 years of British rule the Western had not been able to take from these people what they prize most, their dignity. People trying to live a decent life, who hope to live with at least an ounce of self-respect going to great extremes to attain it.

It doesn't surprise me to know this today, nor does it surprise me to know it took so long for the world to know this. What amazes me is that so many Indians have written such bad reviews about this book. It seems ironic that a book that tells a story about the majority of Indians who are uneducated is not appreciated by the minority that are. It makes sense though. This book doesn't directly attempt to glorify India's culture, its traditions or values. Instead it speaks about the bitter realities of a ghetto that almost all educated Indians with a modern outlook likes to pretend don't exist. These are the people that Westerners mostly interact with, these are the people who want to impress India to the rest of the world, and the truths in this book are not what they would think is impressive. It still impressive none the less. In fact it is more than impressive that even at the lowest of low of economic degradation a man can still try to live a life of dignity - the kind that every human being deserves to live with.

IF AFTER READING THIS BOOK YOU SHED A TEAR, either of joy or sorrow, GO TO THE PEOPLE YOU LOVE MOST AND TELL THEM HOW MUCH YOU LOVE THEM, thank them for who they are and after that thank God for the beauty that is your life and lastly thank yourself because you are a wonderful human-being.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars "... a heartrendering tale of the real heros of Calcutta, a tale of the indomitable spirit of humankind to triumph..." , May 18, 2006

By	Harsh Vivek (India) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

"...The 'City of Joy' shall be remembered as the best account of the life of the people in Calcutta's slums; of the city's never-say-die attitude. The book presents a very emotional account of the daily lives of the poor in the city, and makes the reader fall in love with these little heros, who daily fight the battle of life to mete out a subsistence existence. The book is an eye-opener to the people who have never faced the adversities of life. The author has done a brilliant job in portraying the poor with compassion and empathy. A true masterpiece..."