Pity the poor Chawla family of Shahkot, India--their son, Sampath causes all kinds of trouble for his family, culminating in a Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard, but in a village like Shakhot, hullabaloo is a way of life. Indian writer Kiran Desai begins her first novel with Sampath's birth at the tail-end of a terrible drought. His mother, Kulfi, half-maddened by heat and hunger, can think of nothing but food: "Her stomach grew larger. Her dreams of eating more extravagant. The house seemed to shrink. All about her the summer stretched white-hot into an infinite distance. Finally, in desperation for another landscape, she found a box of old crayons in the back of a cupboard and ... began to draw.... As her husband and mother-in-law retreated in horror, not daring to upset her or the baby still inside her, she drew a parade of cooks beheading goats." Sampath's father, Mr. Chawla is a man for whom "oddness, like aches and pains, fits of tears and lethargy" is a source of discomfort; he fears "these uncontrollable, messy puddles of life, the sticky humanness of things." This distaste for sticky humanness will prove problematic for Mr. Chawla later in life when his son grows up to become a young man possessed of a great deal of feeling and very little common sense or ambition.

Mr. Chawla's frustration comes to a head when Sampath loses his menial job at the post office after performing an impromptu cross-dressing strip-tease at his boss's daughter's wedding. Confined to the house in disgrace, Sampath runs away from home and takes refuge in the branches of a guava tree in an abandoned orchard outside of town. At first family and townsfolk think he's mad, but in an inspired moment of self-preservation Sampath, who had spent his time in the post office reading other people's mail, reveals some choice secrets about his persecutors and convinces them that he is, in fact, clairvoyant. It isn't long before Mr. Chawla sees the commercial possibilities of having a holy man in the family, and pretty soon the guava orchard has become the latest stop along the spiritual tourism trail.

Take one holy man in a guava tree, add a venal father, a food-obsessed mother and a younger sister in love with the Hungry Hop Kwality Ice Cream boy and you've got a recipe for delicious comedy. Mix in a rioting band of alcoholic monkeys, a journalist determined to expose Sampath as a fraud, an unholy trio of hypochondriac district medical officer, army general and university professor, all determined to solve the monkey problem, and you've got a real hullabaloo. Kiran Desai's delirious tale of love, faith, and family relationships is funny, smartly written, and reminiscent of other works by Indian authors writing in English such as Salman Rushdie's The Moor's Last Sigh, Banerjee Divakaruni's The Mistress of Spices and Shashi Tharoor's Show Business. --Alix Wilber


From School Library Journal
YA-This delightful romp is full of zany characters that wreak havoc on a village in India. Sampath, the ambitionless son of the middle-class Chawla family, wants to escape the looming responsibilities of his adult life. He decides to climb into a guava tree and live there in peaceful contemplation. The townspeople start to revere him as a holy man and seek his counsel for their problems. His enigmatic responses only increase their awe for him. His father reacts by looking at the commercial possibilities of having many pilgrims coming to see Sampath. His mother spends her days searching the countryside for rare and unusual food to prepare for him. His sister struggles to maintain her independence but falls hopelessly in love with the Hungry Hop Ice Cream boy. Inept bureaucrats, bungling army officers, a spy for the atheist society, and a herd of monkeys with a taste for liquor add to this hilariously irreverent story. With humor that transcends cultures, this funny story about a very eccentric family will appeal to many teens.Penny Stevens, Centreville Regional Library, Centreville, VACopyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
Desai's first novel is a wild, sad, humorous story about the oldest son of an eccentric family in a small Indian village. Born at the moment a crash of thunder signals the end of a long, hot drought, Sampath grows into a disappointing young man. After he loses a job, Sampath's mother attempts to comfort him with a guava, but it explodes as Sampath is admiring its green coolness, compelling him to flee his family and village to an abandoned orchard, climb into a guava tree, and stay there. He quickly becomes known as the tree baba. The rest of the family moves to the orchard with Sampath's ambitious father, who is determined to exploit the economic possibilities of the newly proclaimed baba. Desai's novel is full of wonderfully portrayed characters and beautifully vivid descriptions of animals, plant life, and the dusty environs of the village. An unqualified pleasure to read, this novel is highly recommended for all libraries.?Rebecca A. Stuhr, Grinnell Coll. Libs., Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.


The New York Times Book Review, Zia Jaffrey
There's a lot of excellent writing in these pages; Desai has a lovely ear for dialogue; the monkeys are beautifully evoked...


The Atlantic Monthly, Phoebe-Lou Adams
Ms. Desai's giddily irreverent novel concerns Sampath, a young Hindu with no ambition for anything but quiet solitude in a cool spot. His town is hot and crowded. His father is financially ambitious. His mother is daft about food, and his grandmother is daft about health. Sampath finds a deserted orchard and settles in a guava tree, where he inadvertently becomes the local holy hermit. In crackling, witty, sharply visual prose, Ms. Desai mocks pious enthusiasm, official incompetence, domestic confusion, young love, marriage customs, sacred monkeys, and a few subsidiary targets. She is a delightfully funny, amiable satirist, with the Puckish view that "this their jangling I esteem a sport."


The New Yorker
Desai is a lavish, sharp-eyed fabulist whose send-up of small-town culture cuts to the heart of human perversity.


The Wall Street Journal, Claudia Rosett
With this spritely first novel, Kiran Desai takes her place among the pack of gifted young Indian writers now tracking a society where stock scandals have begun to steal the spotlight from gurus....


The New York Times, Michiko Kakutani
[T]he novel stands as a meticulously crafted piece of gently comic satire--a small, finely tuned fable that attests to the author's pitch-perfect ear for character and mood, and her natural storytelling gifts.


The Los Angeles Times Sunday Book Review, Susan Salter Reynolds
Hullabaloo is right. Here is a novel created by an explosion of magical realism, a perfect defense of the notion that anything taken to its extreme turns into its opposite. The sheer effort to be weird, to create unbelievable characters in social contortions, unfortunately shows, rendering the unbelievable commonplace, the rebellious bourgeois, the unpredictable predictable.


From Kirkus Reviews
This enchanting first novel, set in the Indian village of Shakhot, details the agreeable chaos that ensues from its underachieving protagonist's decision to abandon the workaday world and live in a tree. Sampath Chawla was born during an insufferably hot summer (when ``The bees flew drunk on nectar that had turned alcoholic'') at the precise moment that a Red Cross plane delivering supplies to ``famine camps'' inadvertently showered its bounty on grateful Shakhot. This wry allusion to Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children is only one of numerous grace notes in a beguiling narrative that displays its character's eccentricities abundantly while never reducing them to caricatures. Sampath, at 20 having become a morose failure as a postal employee, attains widespread celebrity when his matter-of-fact revelations, delivered from the guava tree where hes taken residence, show a deep knowledge of his neighbors' secrets (hes gained it from secretly reading their mail), convincing all and sundry that ``the Hermit of Shakhot'' is ``one of an unusual spiritual nature, his childlike ways being coupled with unfathomable wisdom.'' Things grow more complicated when a passel of ``cinema monkeys'' (so named for their harassment of female moviegoers) join Sampath in his tree, the Atheist Society arranges surveillance of his ``activity,'' and a research scientist, a retired Brigadier, a police superintendent, and other suspicious citizens lock horns with a hastily assembled Monkey Protection Society. Desai's affectionate scrutiny of her maladroit protagonist is further sweetened, as it were, by deft comic portraits of Sampath's family, including most memorably his food-fixated mother Kulfi and his desperate father, a ``practical'' martinet who laments: ``What good is it to be the head of a family when you had a son who ran and sat in a tree? Newcomer Desai is the daughter of highly praised Indian novelist Anita Desai. Its a pleasure to report that this particular fruit of a distinguished literary lineage, having fallen rather far from the tree, is producing bountiful and delicious results. (First printing of 50,000, author tour) -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.


Review
"Enchanting--A meticulously crafted piece of gently comic satire that attests to the author's pitch-perfect ear for character and mood, and her natural storytelling gifts."
--Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

"Clearly envisioned and opulently told."
--Chicago Tribune

"Delectable--With this sprightly first novel, Kiran Desai takes her place among the pack of gifted young Indian writers."
--The Wall Street Journal

"Crackling, witty, sharply visual prose--[Desai] is a delightfully funny, amiable satirist."
--Atlantic Monthly

"A festival of comic eccentricity--exudes charisma, poetry, and joy in language and life."
--Baltimore Sun

"A charming, lyrical fable about destiny and the nature of kinship."
--Harper's Bazaar

"Wryly hilarious--a roller-coaster ride through the nonsense of chance and human foolishness."
--Portland Oregonian

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard is the story of Sampath Chawla, born in a time of drought into a family not quite like other families, in a town not quite like other towns. After years of failure at school, failure at work, of spending his days dreaming in the tea stalls and singing to himself in the public gardens, it does not seem as if Sampath is going to amount to much. "But the world is round," says his grandmother. "Wait and see!" No one believes her, until one day Sampath climbs a guava tree in search of peaceful contemplation and becomes unexpectedly famous as a holy man. Sampath's newfound fame sends the tiny town of Shahkot into turmoil. His feisty sister falls in love with the very unsuitable Hungry Hop Ice Cream Boy; a syndicate of larcenous, alcoholic monkeys terrorizes the pilgrims who cluster around Sampath's tree; his father attempts to turn the orchard into a highly profitable carnival scene; and an overzealous spy determines to get to the bottom of it all and, to his consternation, achieves this goal in a most unpleasant way.

SYNOPSIS

Praised by Salman Rushdie as "lush and intensely imagined," Kiran Desai's wryly comic story of life, love, and family relationships simultaneously captures the vivid culture of the Indian subcontinent and the universal intricacies of human experience. A failure at school and a failure at work, a dreamer who spends his days dreaming in tea stalls and singing to himself in public gardens, 20-year-old Sampath Chawla hardly seems destined for great things. But one day, after climbing a guava tree in search of peaceful contemplation, Sampath awakes to find himself proclaimed "the Hermit of Shakhot." Embracing his new career as a holy man, Sampath unburdens himself of a wealth of hilariously prosaic and often uncanny revelations that upset the social equilibrium of his small hometown and send its outrageous inhabitants careening out of control.

FROM THE CRITICS

Library Journal

Desai's first novel is a wild, sad, humorous story about the oldest son of an eccentric family in a small Indian village. Born at the moment a crash of thunder signals the end of a long, hot drought, Sampath grows into a disappointing young man. After he loses a job, Sampath's mother attempts to comfort him with a guava, but it explodes as Sampath is admiring its green coolness, compelling him to flee his family and village to an abandoned orchard, climb into a guava tree, and stay there. He quickly becomes known as the tree baba. The rest of the family moves to the orchard with Sampath's ambitious father, who is determined to exploit the economic possibilities of the newly proclaimed baba. Desai's novel is full of wonderfully portrayed characters and beautifully vivid descriptions of animals, plant life, and the dusty environs of the village.-- Rebecca A. Stuhr, Grinnell College Libraries, Iowa

Library Journal

Desai's first novel is a wild, sad, humorous story about the oldest son of an eccentric family in a small Indian village. Born at the moment a crash of thunder signals the end of a long, hot drought, Sampath grows into a disappointing young man. After he loses a job, Sampath's mother attempts to comfort him with a guava, but it explodes as Sampath is admiring its green coolness, compelling him to flee his family and village to an abandoned orchard, climb into a guava tree, and stay there. He quickly becomes known as the tree baba. The rest of the family moves to the orchard with Sampath's ambitious father, who is determined to exploit the economic possibilities of the newly proclaimed baba. Desai's novel is full of wonderfully portrayed characters and beautifully vivid descriptions of animals, plant life, and the dusty environs of the village.-- Rebecca A. Stuhr, Grinnell College Libraries, Iowa

NY Times Book Review

...[a] lively, imaginative novel about a cracked youth who becomes an object of worship in his hometown.

Lucius Lau

...[The book has] a wry, humorous attitude toward human foibles....[and] lighthearted strangeness. --A. Magazine

Michiko Kakutani

A finely tuned fable that attests to the author's pitch-perfect ear...The author delineates [the characters] with such wit and bemused affection that they insinuate themselves insidiously in our minds. -- The New York TimesRead all 15 "From The Critics" >

WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING

This is a beguiling novel, fresh and funny and warmhearted. — Roxana Robinson

A hullabaloo of a debut from a vibrant, creative imagination. — Gita Mehta

...[I]ntensely imagined. Welcome proof that India's encounter with the English language continues to give birth to new children, endowed with lavish gifts. — Salman Rushdie

A delicious blend of humor and magic, hilarity and wisdom -- and unexpected poetry. Kiran Desai's language will contine to delight you long after you turn the last page. — Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni