DEEPTI KAPOOR grew up in Northern India and attended college in New Delhi, where she worked for several years as a journalist. A Bad Character is her first novel. She lives in Goa.
From the Hardcover edition.
A Bad Character
eBook
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ISBN-13:
9780385352758
- Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
- Publication date: 01/20/2015
- Sold by: Random House
- Format: eBook
- Pages: 256
- Sales rank: 364,891
- File size: 3 MB
Available on NOOK devices and apps
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A highly charged fiction debut about a young woman in India, and the love that both shatters and transforms her
She is twenty, restless in New Delhi. Her mother has died; her father has left for Singapore.
He is a few years older, just back to India from New York.
When they meet in a café one afternoon, she—lonely, hungry for experience, yearning to break free of tradition—casts aside her fears and throws herself headlong into a love affair, one that takes her where she has never been before.
Told in a voice at once gritty and lyrical, mournful and frank, A Bad Character marks the arrival of an astonishingly gifted new writer. It is an unforgettable hymn to a dangerous, exhilarating city, and a portrait of desire and its consequences as timeless as it is universal.
From the Hardcover edition.
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“A fiery, incandescent debut [that] artfully captures the perilous desires of a woman alone in New Delhi. Kapoor’s novel smolders with submerged rage, pain, abandonment and erotic desire. . . . Promises great things to come.” —The Huffington Post
“A dark, hypnotic story.” —Hanya Yanagihara, author of A Little Life
“[Kapoor] writes with a keening, furious sorrow that rang in my ears well after I finished the book.” —Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal
“Marguerite Duras meets new India.” —Vogue.com
“Captivating . . . A Bad Character echoes Nabokov’s Lolita with a story about the sexual initiation of a young woman, but offers a female perspective, one that doesn’t pull any punches. . . . Literary voices like Kapoor’s . . . are now more crucial than ever.” —The Rumpus
“Spellbinding: Here is a novel about sex, about drugs, about a city on the brink of awe-inspiring and terrible change.” —Nell Freudenberger, author of The Newlyweds
“India, once again. Its dark underbelly—flashing images of poverty and squalor, corruption and drugs and, above all, battered lives . . . Here’s a young woman, named Deepti Kapoor, picking up where the others have left off, adding something here (a female protagonist), subtracting something there (sentiment), splashing into our lives like the beginning of the monsoon hitting Delhi’s streets. And the irony of it all? By the last page you have to ask yourself who is the bad character of her title: the unnamed female narrator, or the man whose life she believes she has unpacked so carefully.” —Counterpunch
“A stylishly written, powerfully moving love story. . . . What Twilight in Delhi is to the 20th century Indian novel, A Bad Character is to the 21st: the essence of India’s corrupt capital, brilliantly and darkly distilled. This is a remarkable debut from a major new talent.” —William Dalrymple, author of The Last Mughal
“Riveting . . . Kapoor’s debut novel is a coming-of-age tale as complex, gritty and frankly terrifying as Delhi, the city that forms its backdrop.” —Bustle
“An intimate, raw exploration of [a] profound transformation.” —Booklist
“Sharply told.” —Largehearted Boy
“Haunting . . . . A beguiling, hallucinatory experience, at once unsettling and intimate. . . . A Bad Character is an astounding book: read it with the scent of diesel in your nostrils and red dust in your mouth.” —The New Indian Express
“A poignant and impressionistic portrait of the end of adolescence and a changing world.”—The Telegraph (London)
“Impressive in its . . . evocation of a dazzling, dangerous cityscape.” —Kirkus
This promising debut explores the intense, short-term relationship that the novel's young female narrator commences with the title's ostensibly "bad character." Idha's lover is unnamed, giving the dark-skinned, unattractive, moody, and wealthy youth an even greater air of mystery. He introduces Idha to a slice of Delhi life spiked with cigarettes, drugs, alcohol, and passionate sex. This slice is juxtaposed to the mundane, even sedate existence she leads with her aunt, who intends to marry her off to the first appropriate prospect who comes along. Kapoor seduces readers with the breathless pace of a first-person, nonlinear narrative told by a young woman desperate to escape the comfort of her present situation and a likely staid future as a married woman. The author describes Delhi with courage and without sentimentality, capturing the allure of forbidden but accessible fruit for Idha and thus for any young Indian woman. VERDICT The real appeal of this novel is that Kapoor never allows her young narrator a final resolution. Idha continues seeking her independence and pursuing bad characters, arguably including herself. Recommended as a counter to fiction that romanticizes contemporary India and especially the lives of women there.—Faye Chadwell, Oregon State Univ., Corvallis