Immigrant, Montana - Hardcover
The author of the widely praised Lunch with a Bigot now gives us a remarkable novel--reminiscent of Teju Cole, W.G. Sebald, and John Berger--about a young new immigrant to the U.S. in search of love: across dividing lines between cultures, between sexes, and between the particular desires of one man and the women he comes to love.
The young man is Kailash, from India. His new American friends call him Kalashnikov, AK-47, AK. He takes it all in his stride: he wants to fit in--and more than that, to shine. In the narrative of his years at a university in New York, AK describes the joys and disappointments of his immigrant experience; the unfamiliar political and social textures of campus life; the indelible influence of a charismatic professor--also an immigrant, his personal history as dramatic as AK's is decidedly not; the very different natures of the women he loved; and of himself in and out of love with each of them. Telling his own story, AK is both meditative and the embodiment of the enthusiasm of youth in all its idealism and chaotic desires. His wry, vivid perception of the world he's making his own, and the brilliant melding of story and reportage, anecdote and annotation, picture and text, gives us a singularly engaging, insightful, and moving novel--one that explores the varieties and vagaries of cultural misunderstanding, but is, as well, an impassioned investigation of love.
The young man is Kailash, from India. His new American friends call him Kalashnikov, AK-47, AK. He takes it all in his stride: he wants to fit in--and more than that, to shine. In the narrative of his years at a university in New York, AK describes the joys and disappointments of his immigrant experience; the unfamiliar political and social textures of campus life; the indelible influence of a charismatic professor--also an immigrant, his personal history as dramatic as AK's is decidedly not; the very different natures of the women he loved; and of himself in and out of love with each of them. Telling his own story, AK is both meditative and the embodiment of the enthusiasm of youth in all its idealism and chaotic desires. His wry, vivid perception of the world he's making his own, and the brilliant melding of story and reportage, anecdote and annotation, picture and text, gives us a singularly engaging, insightful, and moving novel--one that explores the varieties and vagaries of cultural misunderstanding, but is, as well, an impassioned investigation of love.
"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
About the Author:
AMITAVA KUMAR is a writer and journalist. He was born in Ara, and grew up in the nearby town of Patna, famous for its corruption, crushing poverty, and delicious mangoes. Kumar is the author of several books of nonfiction and a novel. He lives in Poughkeepsie, in upstate New York, where he is Professor of English on the Helen D. Lockwood Chair at Vassar College. In 2016, Amitava Kumar was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship (General Nonfiction) as well as a Ford Fellowship in Literature from United States Artists.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:
I was a new immigrant, eager to shine, and if self-abuse were to be omitted from the reckoning, pure of body and heart. The letters I sent my parents in India were full of enthusiasm for the marvels of my new life. To those who welcomed me to America, I wanted to say, without even being asked, that E.T. ought to have won the Oscar over Gandhi. I had found the latter insufficiently authentic but more crucially I felt insufficiently authentic myself. Not so much fake as insubstantial. I understood that I needed a suitable narrative to present to the people I was meeting. There was only contempt in my heart for my fellow Indian students who repeated stories about trying to educate ignorant Americans in barbershops who had asked how come they spoke such good English or if they belonged to tribes or grew up among tigers. The nostalgia I had come to treasure was a hypertrophied sense of the past as a place, a place with street signs and a figure atop a staircase that I recognized. This desire had nothing to do with the kinds of claims to civilizational superiority that make men demolish places of worship or want to bomb cities into oblivion. I knew this and yet I was uncertain about my story. I lacked calm self-knowledge. If a woman spoke to me, particularly if she was attractive, I grew excited and talked too much.
I’m talking of what happened more than two decades ago; my first years here and my first loves. But the reality of my becoming who I am now, this evolution, as it were, goes back in time to the monkeys that surrounded me as an infant. This is my own, personal Origin of Species. The red-bottomed monkeys of my childhood would leave the branches of the big tamarind tree and peel the oranges left unattended on the balcony of Lotan Mamaji’s house. This was in Ara, in eastern India, in the late sixties. A war with Pakistan was over and another loomed in the future. Prime Minister Nehru had been dead only a few years. In the language of the history books, the nation was in turmoil.
Lotan Mamaji was my mother’s younger brother. A giant of a man, immense and bearded, paan tucked under one dark cheek like a secret that he didn’t want to share. One winter morning, while everyone on the balcony sat listening to the radio, following the cricket commentary from Eden Gardens, a monkey stole into Mamaji’s room. He climbed on the huge white bed and finding Mamaji’s pistol brandished it—they say—at my cousin who was born two months after me and still in her crib. No one moved. Then, turning the pistol around, the primate mind prompting the opposable thumb to grasp the trigger, the monkey blew his brains out. He was a medium-size young male. Bits of flesh, bone, hair, and gray matter had to be cleaned from the pictures of the long-dead family patriarchs hanging on the wall.
There were so many lies repeated in the family, so many half secrets, I don’t know why I never asked anyone if the monkey story was true. For a long time, it had been lodged in my mind as a baptismal tale that taught me the nature of fear, or maybe provided a lesson about fate. But then the past lost its authority and the meaning of the story changed. I had by then come out of my teen years. The main questions now were about the fiction of the past, the idea I had of myself as a person, and what it meant for me to become a writer.
For so many years, the idea of writing has meant recognizing and even addressing a division in my life: the gap between India, the land of my birth, and the United States, where I arrived as a young adult. If and when I imagine an audience for my writing, it is also a divided one. But the two places are connected, not only by those histories that cultural organizations celebrate through endlessly dull annual gatherings but by millions of individual yearnings, all those stories of consummated or thwarted desire. There are many of my populous tribe who have examined the wonder and the mystery of this condition.
Consider the monkeys in Ara, the Rhesus macaques. They were not just visitors to my maternal uncle’s home. They have a place in my imagination because they too were unheralded immigrants in America. A few years ago, I read in a newspaper report that the problem Delhi residents were having with monkeys went back to the early years of Indian independence, when thousands from that region were sent to America for scientific purposes. As many as twenty to fifty thousand monkeys were exported each year. A newly independent India was in need of foreign exchange. The Americans needed middle-aged male monkeys for their experiments. The result of the selective trapping, according to a primatologist interviewed for the report, was the disruption of the ecological balance. The disruption took place because the family unit was broken and the monkey groups entered a process of division that the primatologist termed chaotic fission.
But let’s take a step back from the political and enter the riskier domain of the personal. I want to focus on why monkeys came to mind when I started work on this book. I claim kinship with the monkeys of my childhood because of what I read in a magazine in 2010: Rhesus macaques, who normally are not self-aware, will, following brain surgery, examine their genitals in a mirror. Similar evidence of self-awareness was previously limited to higher primates, dolphins, magpies, and an elephant named Happy (“Findings,” Harper’s Magazine, December 2010, p. 84).
I’m talking of what happened more than two decades ago; my first years here and my first loves. But the reality of my becoming who I am now, this evolution, as it were, goes back in time to the monkeys that surrounded me as an infant. This is my own, personal Origin of Species. The red-bottomed monkeys of my childhood would leave the branches of the big tamarind tree and peel the oranges left unattended on the balcony of Lotan Mamaji’s house. This was in Ara, in eastern India, in the late sixties. A war with Pakistan was over and another loomed in the future. Prime Minister Nehru had been dead only a few years. In the language of the history books, the nation was in turmoil.
Lotan Mamaji was my mother’s younger brother. A giant of a man, immense and bearded, paan tucked under one dark cheek like a secret that he didn’t want to share. One winter morning, while everyone on the balcony sat listening to the radio, following the cricket commentary from Eden Gardens, a monkey stole into Mamaji’s room. He climbed on the huge white bed and finding Mamaji’s pistol brandished it—they say—at my cousin who was born two months after me and still in her crib. No one moved. Then, turning the pistol around, the primate mind prompting the opposable thumb to grasp the trigger, the monkey blew his brains out. He was a medium-size young male. Bits of flesh, bone, hair, and gray matter had to be cleaned from the pictures of the long-dead family patriarchs hanging on the wall.
There were so many lies repeated in the family, so many half secrets, I don’t know why I never asked anyone if the monkey story was true. For a long time, it had been lodged in my mind as a baptismal tale that taught me the nature of fear, or maybe provided a lesson about fate. But then the past lost its authority and the meaning of the story changed. I had by then come out of my teen years. The main questions now were about the fiction of the past, the idea I had of myself as a person, and what it meant for me to become a writer.
For so many years, the idea of writing has meant recognizing and even addressing a division in my life: the gap between India, the land of my birth, and the United States, where I arrived as a young adult. If and when I imagine an audience for my writing, it is also a divided one. But the two places are connected, not only by those histories that cultural organizations celebrate through endlessly dull annual gatherings but by millions of individual yearnings, all those stories of consummated or thwarted desire. There are many of my populous tribe who have examined the wonder and the mystery of this condition.
Consider the monkeys in Ara, the Rhesus macaques. They were not just visitors to my maternal uncle’s home. They have a place in my imagination because they too were unheralded immigrants in America. A few years ago, I read in a newspaper report that the problem Delhi residents were having with monkeys went back to the early years of Indian independence, when thousands from that region were sent to America for scientific purposes. As many as twenty to fifty thousand monkeys were exported each year. A newly independent India was in need of foreign exchange. The Americans needed middle-aged male monkeys for their experiments. The result of the selective trapping, according to a primatologist interviewed for the report, was the disruption of the ecological balance. The disruption took place because the family unit was broken and the monkey groups entered a process of division that the primatologist termed chaotic fission.
But let’s take a step back from the political and enter the riskier domain of the personal. I want to focus on why monkeys came to mind when I started work on this book. I claim kinship with the monkeys of my childhood because of what I read in a magazine in 2010: Rhesus macaques, who normally are not self-aware, will, following brain surgery, examine their genitals in a mirror. Similar evidence of self-awareness was previously limited to higher primates, dolphins, magpies, and an elephant named Happy (“Findings,” Harper’s Magazine, December 2010, p. 84).
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- PublisherHamish Hamilton
- Publication date2018
- ISBN 10 0735234965
- ISBN 13 9780735234963
- BindingHardcover
- Number of pages320
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Immigrant, Montana
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