Harbart
Description
Poor, poor, hard-luck Herbert Sarkar: born into a fancy Calcutta family but cursed from birth (his philandering movie director father is killed in a car crash and his mother dies soon after, when he's still just a baby), he is taken as an orphan into his uncle's house, only to fall further and further down the family totem pole. Despite good looks ("Hollywood-ish, Leslie Howard-ish)" and native talents, he is scorned by all but his kind aunt. Poor Herbert: so lovable but so little loved. Cheated of his inheritance, living on the roof in cast-off clothing, he pines for love, but all is woe: his own nephews beat him up.At twenty, however, he suddenly seems to possess the gift of speaking with the dead. Herbert is bathed in glory. From less than zero to starry heights--what an apotheosis. The wheel of fortune turns again, all too soon...
Legendary, scathingly satiric, wildly energetic, deeply tender, Herbert is an Indian masterwork.
Product Details
Price
$13.95
$12.97
Publisher
New Directions Publishing Corporation
Publish Date
June 25, 2019
Pages
112
Dimensions
5.1 X 7.9 X 0.5 inches | 0.3 pounds
Language
English
Type
Paperback
EAN/UPC
9780811224734
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About the Author
Nabarun Bhattacharya (1948-2014) was a prominent Bengali writer who enjoyed cult following in his lifetime and beyond. A journalist from 1973 to 1991 at a foreign news agency, he gave up that career to become a full-time writer. Novelist and short-story writer, he was also a prolific poet.
SUNANDINI BANERJEE is the chief editor and senior designer of Seagull Books.
Reviews
Bhattacharya occupies an uneasy place in the pantheon of Bengali greats--celebrated, disillusioned, and most subversive.
An astonishing novel, zany, terrifying, and liberating in equal measure, by a writer who was a visionary.--Siddharta Deb
What is needed [now] is a kind of novel that attends to how society is being organized by certain vested interests; a novel that goes to the heart--rather, goes for the jugular--of the economic system itself. Harbart is prophetic of this tradition to come.
Harbart is a haunted man--a victim-participant in the forward march of capitalism and of the impetus to assign significance to the pointlessness and chaos of material existence. Banerjee's acrobatic translation is both enormously fun and true to the radical content.-- (06/17/2019)
A remarkable resurrection, one that erupts full-blooded, alive with laughter, stink and rage.--John Domini (07/22/2019)
Harbart reads like Rainer Maria Rilke's Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge set in Calcutta. Featuring a young man with an open channel to the dead who drinks and grieves to excess, it is a mosaic of manic and immersive episodes. It is a spinning drunken stumble through a city that feels menacingly sensual.-- (06/03/2019)
An astonishing novel, zany, terrifying, and liberating in equal measure, by a writer who was a visionary.--Siddharta Deb
What is needed [now] is a kind of novel that attends to how society is being organized by certain vested interests; a novel that goes to the heart--rather, goes for the jugular--of the economic system itself. Harbart is prophetic of this tradition to come.
Harbart is a haunted man--a victim-participant in the forward march of capitalism and of the impetus to assign significance to the pointlessness and chaos of material existence. Banerjee's acrobatic translation is both enormously fun and true to the radical content.-- (06/17/2019)
A remarkable resurrection, one that erupts full-blooded, alive with laughter, stink and rage.--John Domini (07/22/2019)
Harbart reads like Rainer Maria Rilke's Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge set in Calcutta. Featuring a young man with an open channel to the dead who drinks and grieves to excess, it is a mosaic of manic and immersive episodes. It is a spinning drunken stumble through a city that feels menacingly sensual.-- (06/03/2019)
