Research Catalog
The wedding
- Title
- The wedding / Imraan Coovadia.
- Author
- Coovadia, Imraan.
- Publication
- New York : Picador USA, 2001.
Items in the Library & Off-site
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1 Item
| Status | Format | Access | Call Number | Item Location |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Text | Request in advance | PR9369.3.C65 W4 2001 | Off-site |
Holdings
Details
- Description
- 280 pages; 22 cm
- Summary
- "Family destiny, as we learn in Imraan Coovadia's The Wedding, can hang from the slenderest of threads. For Ismet Nassim, a clerk of modest prospects and generous girth from Bombay, everything turns on the moment when, from the window of the train on which he happens to be sitting comfortably, he spies a young woman standing next to a village well - not just any woman, but the most beautiful woman in the world.
- Should he pull down the shade and resume his quiet bachelor ways, his placid existence of ledgers and balance sheets? Or throw caution to the wind and pursue this creature, about whom he knows nothing whatsoever? Of course, fate forces him off the train. Ismet pursues his vision of beauty, whose name is Khateja, and marries her the very next day. Destiny (and, as it turns out, Khateja's own family) heaves a sigh of relief.".
- "Ismet, however, is in for the fight of his life. Though she agrees to marry this baggy, shambling clerk, Khateja also resolves to make his life as miserable as possible, informing him even before they exchange vows that love and obedience will play no part in this arrangement. Thrown together so in what seems a hilariously awkward misalliance of spirits and souls, a weary but determined Ismet and the fiercely eloquent Khateja forge their way ahead.".
- "Set in India and South Africa (to which Ismet and Khateja, like many Indians - including an ambitious young lawyer named Mohandas Gandhi - emigrate at the turn of the century), The Wedding is based upon family stories Coovadia heard as a child growing up in Durban.
- Our narrator is Ismet and Khateja's grandson, casting his unsparing but affectionate gaze back on his forebears' heartrending yet highly entertaining marital strife, while exploring the greater themes of exile and cultural estrangement that bind them all, grandparents and grandson, to a common fate.
- Here is a novel that reaches back through the twists and turns of family legend to find that dazzlingly slender thread of destiny, the precarious momentousness of a single glance from the window of a train, and from it weaves a story of transforming power and poignancy."--BOOK JACKET.
- Subjects
- Genre/Form
- Humorous fiction.
- Domestic fiction.
- ISBN
- 0312272197
- LCCN
- 2001031947
- OCLC
- ocm46959564
- SCSB-4217716
- Owning Institutions
- Columbia University Libraries