The City Son
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Samrat Upadhyay. (2014). The City Son. Soho Press.

Samrat Upadhyay. 2014. The City Son. Soho Press.

Samrat Upadhyay, The City Son. Soho Press, 2014.

Samrat Upadhyay. The City Son. Soho Press, 2014.

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keywords

1. • value: family
2. • value: relationships
3. • value: obsession
4. • value: 21st century
5. • value: Friendship
6. • value: literary fiction
7. • value: relationship
8. • value: motherhood
9. • value: romance
10. • value: sisters
11. • value: contemporary fiction
12. • value: Fiction
13. • value: mental health
14. • value: novels
15. • value: Taboo
16. • value: abuse
17. • value: love
18. • value: Coming of age
19. • value: Identity
20. • value: Death
21. • value: Healing
22. • value: women
23. • value: mystery
24. • value: Drama
25. • value: Women's Fiction
26. • value: Horror
27. • value: murder
28. • value: Psychological
29. • value: revenge
30. • value: novel
31. • value: psychology
32. • value: Thriller
33. • value: grief
34. • value: feminism
35. • value: Spirituality
36. • value: infidelity
37. • value: roman
38. • value: black magic
39. • value: International
40. • value: literature
41. • value: Nepal
42. • value: fiction books
43. • value: gifts for women
44. • value: gifts for her
45. • value: realistic fiction books
46. • value: women gifts
47. • value: books fiction

creators

1. • role: Author
   • fileAs: Upadhyay, Samrat
   • bioText: Samrat Upadhyay was born and raised in Nepal. He is the author of Arresting God in Kathmandu, a Whiting Award winner; The Royal Ghost; The Guru of Love, a New York Times Notable Book and a San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of the Year; and Buddha’s Orphans. He has written for The New York Times and has appeared on BBC Radio and National Public Radio. Upadhyay teaches in the creative writing program at Indiana University.
   • name: Samrat Upadhyay

publishDate

2014-06-17T00:00:00-04:00

isOwnedByCollections

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title

The City Son

fullDescription

Set in Samrat Upadhyay’s signature and timeless Nepal, The City Son offers a vivid portrait of a scorned woman’s lifelong obsession with revenge and the devastating ramifications for an impressionable young man.
Acclaimed and award-winning author Samrat Upadhyay—the first Nepali-born novelist writing in English to be published in the West—has crafted a spare, understated work examining a taboo subject: a wife’s obsession with her husband’s illegitimate son. When Didi discovers that her husband, the Masterji, has been hiding his beautiful lover and their young son, Tarun, in a nearby city, she takes the Masterji back into her grasp and expels his second family. Tarun’s mother, heartsick and devastated, slowly begins to lose her mind, and Tarun turns to Didi for the mothering he longs for. But as Tarun gets older, Didi’s domination of the boy turns from the emotional to the physical, and the damages she inflicts spiral outward, threatening to destroy Tarun’s one chance at true happiness. Potent, disturbing, and gorgeously stark in its execution, The City Son is a novel not soon forgotten.

reviews

1. • premium: False
   • source: The Wall Street Journal
   • content: "Fearless . . . There's an eerie element of black magic in Didi's Svengali-like manipulation that evokes the domestic horror novels of Shirley Jackson. This superb book stages an intensely powerful showdown."
2. • premium: False
   • source: Cleveland Plain Dealer
   • content: "Reading Samrat Upadhyay's disturbing new novel, "The City Son," is the literary equivalent of watching a horror film. His style is assured and unadorned. The occasional metaphor, such as "this dead blackbird inside her," arrives to arresting effect. Upadhyay leaves us holding our breaths."
3. • premium: False
   • source: Booklist
   • content: "[The City Son] examines the vengeance of a truly evil woman scorned . . . Not for the faint of heart."
4. • premium: False
   • source: Publishers Weekly
   • content: "Upadhyay tells his story with simple and direct prose . . . the multicharacter narration adds dramatic depth."
5. • premium: False
   • source: Dan Chaon, author of Await Your Reply
   • content: "Buddha's Orphans is an extraordinary achievement. It has the sweep and romantic grandeur of a great old-fashioned Russian novel, and, at the same time, the precision and intimacy of a beautiful collection of linked stories. Samrat Upadhyay has created a remarkable work, one to be savored and remembered."
6. • premium: False
   • source: Chitra Divakaruni, author of One Amazing Thing and Palace of Illusion
   • content: "Upadhyay has masterfully blended history, tragedy, politics and romance to create the arresting story of a family that is at once unique and universal, set against the backdrop of a vibrant, complicated, modern Nepal that will fascinate readers."
7. • premium: False
   • source: The New York Times
   • content: "Subtle and spiritually complex . . . Mr. Upadhyay's stories bring us into contact with a world that is somehow both far away and very familiar."
8. • premium: False
   • source: USA Today
   • content: "The Guru of Love effectively weaves together the complicated dichotomies of man and mistress, love and lust, tradition and modernity."
9. • premium: False
   • source: Entertainment Weekly
   • content: "Reads like a graceful, page-turning mixture of stirring romance and social commentary."
10. • premium: False
    • source: Christian Science Monitor
    • content: "[Upadhyay's] characters linger. They are captured with such concise, illuminating precision that one begins to feel that they just might be real."
11. • premium: False
    • source: Elle
    • content: "A triumph, a ravishingly seductive novel."
12. • premium: False
    • source: The Los Angeles Times
    • content: "[Upadhyay is] among the smoothest and most noiseless of contemporary writers"
13. • premium: False
    • source: Washington Post Book World
    • content: "[Upadhyay's] stories have been burnished until they glow with visual and emotional precision."
14. • premium: False
    • source: The Indiana Express
    • content: "Highly entertaining . . . a major writer-in-the-making."
15. • premium: False
    • source: Publishers Weekl
    • content: "In an assured and subtle manner, Upadhyay anchors small yet potent epiphanies in a place called Kathmandu, and quietly calls it home."
16. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      March 31, 2014
      After learning that her husband—the Masterji, a tutor living and working in a nearby city—has a secret second family, Didi packs up her two young sons and meets the conflict head-on, forcing her way into Masterji’s urban home. Before long, she has staked claim and evicted the beautiful but troubled Apsara and her preteen son, Tarun. But as Apsara spirals into deep depression, Didi takes a strong interest in Tarun, who visits on weekends, and this interest turns both physical and psychological. Tarun grows into a young man, yet he cannot escape the grip of Didi, who molests him weekly, latching onto his every sexual desire and manipulating his thoughts. And as Apsara dips further into melancholy and mental distress, Didi supplants her as Tarun’s sole mother figure. Author Upadhyay (Arresting God in Kathmandu) tells his story with simple and direct prose. Though Apsara and Tarun find refuge with wealthy Mahesh Uncle, who takes them in and trains Tarun to be his business protégé, the young man cannot shake his past to fully grasp prosperity. Close third-person perspective wanders from character to character, and though the book loses some of its focus by the end (at which point it’s following the exploits of Tarun’s discarded wife), most of the multicharacter narration adds dramatic depth.

17. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      April 1, 2014
      The arc of Upadhyay's narrative is like that of a soap opera, though rather more lurid. Things begin calmly enough in a village in Nepal, though they heat up quickly when Sulochana, otherwise known as Didi, finds out from a local gossip that her husband, the Masterji, has been having a relationship with a woman named Apsara and even has a son by her. This relationship has been made easier logistically because the Masterji, a renowned teacher, has been spending much of his time away from the village teaching in a city. Didi, who's known more for her fiery temperament than for her pulchritude, immediately takes charge by seeking out Tarun, the Masterji's son by Apsara, and bringing him home to live with her; the Masterji; and their two sons, Amit and Sumit. Didi is immediately struck by the beauty of her 11-year-old stepson and begins to favor him, much to the revulsion of Amit in particular. Soon it becomes clear that Didi's relationship to Tarun is becoming increasingly abnormal and sexualized. She finds excuses to spend time alone with him, and as he grows older, their relationship remains highly charged though unconsummated. When Tarun gets married at age 23, he and his wife, Rukma, immediately have problems in the bedroom, and eventually Rukma discovers her husband's appalling secret. This is a story more sad than salacious, and the human cost of the quasi-incest is exceptionally high.

      COPYRIGHT(2014) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

18. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      June 1, 2014
      As if a woman scorned isn't enough of a story, Upadhyay (The Royal Ghosts, 2006) also examines the vengeance of a truly evil woman scorned. Didi, a rural Nepal housewife and mother of two boys, tends the home front while her husband, the Masterji, lives and teaches in a nearby city. The day she learns that the Masterji has another, and more beautiful, wife, Apsara, and son, Tarun, Didi packs up her kids and moves into her cheating spouse's city home. It's a Herculean passive-aggressive parry as she willfully ignores the other woman to the point of driving Apsara to the brink of madness. As for Tarun, Didi showers him with suffocating love and attention, at the expense of her own sons. Her sick devotion to the spawn of her bigamist husband metastasizes into both an emotional and a literal hold on the boy. All this under the spineless Masterji's nose. Upadhyay's depiction of incestuous relations can be lurid, but this makes for a succinct portrayal of Didi's depravity. Not for the faint of heart.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)

popularity

20

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shortDescription

Set in Samrat Upadhyay’s signature and timeless Nepal, The City Son offers a vivid portrait of a scorned woman’s lifelong obsession with revenge and the devastating ramifications for an impressionable young man.
Acclaimed and award-winning author Samrat Upadhyay—the first Nepali-born novelist writing in English to be published in the West—has crafted a spare, understated work examining a taboo subject: a wife’s obsession with her husband’s illegitimate son. When Didi discovers that her husband, the Masterji, has been hiding his beautiful lover and their young son, Tarun, in a nearby city, she takes the Masterji back into her grasp and expels his second family. Tarun’s mother, heartsick and devastated, slowly begins to lose her mind, and Tarun turns to Didi for the mothering he longs for. But as Tarun gets older, Didi’s domination of the boy turns from the emotional to the physical, and the damages she inflicts spiral...

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   • description: Fiction / Literary
2. • code: FIC025000
   • description: Fiction / Psychological
3. • code: FIC044000
   • description: Fiction / Contemporary Women