Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #38607 in Books
• Published on: 2008-10-14
• Released on: 2008-10-14
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 528 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780374174224
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Diaspora, myth and a fascinating language mashup propel the Rubik's cube of plots in Ghosh's picaresque epic of the voyage of the Ibis, a ship transporting Indian girmitiyas (coolies) to Mauritius in 1838. The first two-thirds of the book chronicles how the crew and the human cargo come to the vessel, now owned by rising opium merchant Benjamin Burnham. Mulatto second mate Zachary Reid, a 20-year-old of Lord Jim–like innocence, is passing for white and doesn't realize his secret is known to the gomusta (overseer) of the coolies, Baboo Nob Kissin, an educated Falstaffian figure who believes Zachary is the key to realizing his lifelong mission. Among the human cargo, there are three fugitives in disguise, two on the run from a vengeful family and one hoping to escape from Benjamin. Also on board is a formerly high caste raj who was brought down by Benjamin and is now on his way to a penal colony. The cast is marvelous and the plot majestically serpentine, but the real hero is the English language, which has rarely felt so alive and vibrant. (Oct.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The New Yorker
Ghosh�s best and most ambitious work yet is an adventure story set in nineteenth-century Calcutta against the backdrop of the Opium Wars. On the Ibis, a ship engaged in transporting opium across the Bay of Bengal, varied life stories converge. A fallen raja, a half-Chinese convict, a plucky American sailor, a widowed opium farmer, a transgendered religious visionary are all united by the �smoky paradise� of the opium seed. Ghosh writes with impeccable control, and with a vivid and sometimes surprising imagination: a woman�s tooth protrudes �like a tilted gravestone�; an opium addict�s writhing spasms are akin to �looking at a pack of rats squirming in a sack�; the body of a young man is �a smoking crater that had just risen from the ocean and was still waiting to be explored.�
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From The Washington Post
From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com Since the publication of Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children in 1981, a new and ancient land has imposed itself on the world's literary consciousness, -- a land whose language and concerns have stretched the boundaries of the possible in English literature. A generation of post-colonial Indian writers has brought a larger world -- a teeming, myth-infused, gaudy, exuberant, many-hued and restless world -- past the immigration inspectors of English literature. Today it seems no year goes by without yet another Indian novel announcing its entry into the global canon, confirming Indian writing as among the most innovative and interesting anywhere. Over the last two decades, the Indian author Amitav Ghosh has established himself as a writer of uncommon talent who combines literary flair with a rare seriousness of purpose. His first novel, The Circle of Reason, seemed very much in the Rushdie magical-realist tradition, but he has evolved considerably since then, notably in works like The Shadow Lines and more recently The Glass Palace, which deal movingly and powerfully with the dislocations of post-imperial politics in Bengal and Burma. Sea of Poppies, his sixth novel (and the first of a projected trilogy), marks both a departure and an arrival. It sees Ghosh painting upon a larger canvas than ever before, with a multitude of characters and an epic vision; and the novel is his first to be shortlisted for Britain's Man Booker Prize, one of two Indian novels in a list of six. The year is 1838, and the setting British India, a country immiserated by colonial rule, as fertile agricultural lands are swamped by the flower of the novel's title, grown to produce opium that the British are exporting to addicts in an increasingly resistant China. Hungry Indian peasants, meanwhile, are being driven off their land, and many are recruited to serve as plantation laborers in far-off British colonies like Mauritius. Meanwhile, the clouds of war are looming, as British opium interests in India press for the use of force to compel the Chinese mandarins to keep open their ports, in the name of free trade. Against this background, Sea of Poppies brings together a colorful array of individuals on a triple-masted schooner named the Ibis. There is the widow of an opium addict, saved from a drugged self-immolation on her husband's funeral pyre by an outcaste who signs up for a new life as a worker in Mauritius; a free-spirited French orphan and the Muslim boatman with whom she has grown up; the Ibis's second mate, an American octoroon sailor passing for white; a clerk and mystic possessed by the soul of his female spiritual mentor; a lascar seaman with a piratical past; and a dispossessed Raja who has been stripped of his lands and honor and sentenced to transportation for an innocent act of forgery. The novel unfolds with the stories of the events that bring these "ship-siblings -- jaházbhais and jaházbahens" on board and traces the beginning of their voyage from Calcutta to their unknown destinies across the Black Water. The principal characters' fates are left unresolved -- this is a book that is clearly "to be continued" -- but their stories are compelling. Even though the Ibis's journey is incomplete, it provides enough dramatic tension to keep the reader turning the pages. Ghosh's purpose is clearly both literary and political. His narrative represents a prodigious feat of research; one does not need the impressive bibliography of sources at the end to be struck by the wealth of period detail the author commands. His descriptions bring a lost world to life, from the evocatively imagined opium factory, the intricacies of women's costumes and the lovingly enumerated fare on the opulent dining tables of the era, to the richly detailed descriptions of the Ibis and its journey. At times, Sea of Poppies reads like a cross between an Indian Gone with the Wind and a Victorian novel of manners. And yet Ghosh has managed a sharp reversal of perspective. His ship, with the author's fine feel for nautical niceties, sails in Joseph Conrad territory, through waters since romanticized by the likes of James Clavell. But whereas those writers and so many others placed the white man at the center of their narratives, Ghosh relegates his British colonists to the margins of his story, giving pride of place to the neglected subjects of the imperial enterprise: colonialism's impoverished, and usually colored, victims. He writes with great compassion and empathy about members of the underclass, most of all the migrants, "the men and women who were to be torn from this subjugated plain . . . [from] a soil that had to be sown with suffering to yield its crop of story and song." Ghosh portrays his characters with integrity and dignity; even those with walk-on parts enjoy well-constructed back-stories, and if his Brits -- scheming, perverse and ruthless to a man -- are occasionally caricatures, they all come vividly alive. He is particularly good at representing the distinctive voices: the charming Franglais of the French orphan, the fractured Babu English of a clerk, the semi-comprehensible Anglo-Indianisms of the pilot and the literate cadences of the educated Raja. Occasionally, he goes overboard with his Anglo-Indian argot ("Wasn't a man in town who could put on a burra-khana like he did. Sheeshmull blazing with shammers and candles. . . . Demijohns of French loll-shrub and carboys of iced simkin. And the karibat!") Nor will many readers have the slightest idea what a boatman is doing on deck "tirkaoing hamars, and hauling zanjirs through the hansil-holes." But it doesn't really matter; the language brings in period authenticity and local color, and as with any good vessel, you get the drift quick enough. With this novel, Ghosh, an anthropologist and historian, has come a long way from the magic realism of his first novel. Sea of Poppies is written in a direct and flowing style, its prose confident and unadorned, though on a handful of occasions the author produces a flourish almost as if to show he can do it, as with the hills and crags that "sat upon the plains like a bestiary of gargantuan animals that had been frozen in the act of trying to escape from the grip of the earth." The disgraced Raja enters a courtroom and "the hubbub ceased abruptly, leaving a few last threads of sound to float gently to the floor, like the torn ends of a ribbon." The migration of peasants from the Gangetic plains "was as if fate had thrust its fist through the living flesh of the land in order to tear away a piece of its stricken heart." But the fine writing is in service of a larger cause, the reclaiming of a story appropriated for too long by its villains, those who, centuries ago, conquered foreign lands, subjugated and displaced their peoples, replaced their agriculture with cash crops that caused addiction and death, and enforced all this with the power of the gun masked by a rhetoric of civilization. "When we kill people," a British sea-captain says, "we feel compelled to pretend that it is for some higher cause. It is this pretence of virtue, I promise you, that will never be forgiven by history." Ghosh, on behalf of history, is unforgiving, but his novel is also a delight. I can't wait to see what happens to these laborers and seamen, the defrocked raja and the transgendered mystic in the next volume.
Copyright 2008, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

Customer Reviews

a magnificent historical epic
When the former slaving ship, the Ibis, sails off from America to India, Zachary Reid enlists as a ship's carpenter to escape his American fate as a son of a freed slave girl and her master. Little does he know, how much his life will actually be transformed by this decision...

The year is 1838, and Asia is on the eve of the Opium Wars. The fates of several people become intertwined, as they make their way onto the Ibis. Deeti is a peasant who grows crops of opium, and a wife of the opium factory worker, addicted to the drug. When her husband dies, grey-eyed Deeti has to escape the attention of her vicious brother-in-law. Her only idea is the sati - but unexpectedly, she is snatched from the funeral pyre and becomes an outcast together with her savior, Kalua, the village strongman from the caste of untouchables. They decide to become indentured workers ("coolies") and seek their happiness in the Mauritius. Paulette Lambert, the daughter of a French botanist, is orphaned and cannot bear the strange behavior of Mr Burnham (who happens to be the owner of Ibis), and his family, when he takes her under his protective roof. Neel Rattan, the Raja, finds himself unable to adjust to the changing ways of the colonial world, and, bankrupt, is send to exile. In jail, he meets the half-Chinese Ah Fatt, convicted for robbery. Baboo Nob Kissin (the funniest and probably the most tragic of the main characters), the company's accountant, filled with religious spirit, is overcome by the need of establishing a shrine. All of these original, hilarious characters come to see the overseas trip as an escape. And so their journey is the new beginning.

Amitav Ghosh wrote a great, magnificent, epic novel, a beautiful, complex story revolving around central characters, original and colorful, a great choice of the representatives of the nineteenth-century society in colonial Asia. There are also many great secondary characters (the ship's first mate, Jack Crowle; Jodu, the peasant turned lascar; Serang Ali - the lascar's boss with the gloomy past; the flirtatious girl Munia; and many others), who add a lot of flavor.

The historical details are thoroughly researched - for me, coming from Europe and ignorant of the most part of Asian history, it was a great lesson. The global problems tackled by the author, colonial politics, wars, caste and race, remain significant even today. The geography and landscape descriptions, from India, Calcutta, Mauritius (real and imaginary) to the Sundarbans , one of Ghosh's favorite locations, are also alluring.
The incredibly rich language adds the whole other dimension to the novel. I have to admit that at the beginning the linguistic peculiarities characteristic for each character made the novel difficult to read and I needed to adjust for a while. The sea pidgin, Bengali, Hindi and other dialects of India incorporated into English, with some French added on top of all that, create a unique mix of idiolects. There is a lovely bonus at the end in a form of meticulously done appendix containing Neel's dictionary of sea pidgin, called Chrestomathy.

Fate also plays an essential part in this novel - there are characters, like Deeti, who has a vision of the Ibis, or Baboo Nob Kissin, obsessively devoted to Krishna and his female guru so that he sees signs and omens everywhere, who follow their fate, and there are those who try to run away or do not believe in it... It is intriguing to observe how the fate is present in everyone's story.

I loved the flow of this novel and was completely immersed in the plot, so that I laughed laud at Baboo Nob Kissin and could not repress melancholy and anger when I read some passages. If I could compare it to any other book, it would probably be Barth's "The Sot-Weed Factor" - a picaresque novel of the sea and sailors, which, although set in a very different point in time and space, came to my mind when I was reading "Sea of Poppies".

The open ending left me a little disappointed, because I yearned to know more about the fates of the characters I got to know so well. Therefore, I was very happy to learn that "Sea of Poppies" is the first novel of the planned "Ibis" trilogy. I will await the second one impatiently, hoping that the author can keep up with the first one and will not disappoint the readers!

"If it is God's will that opium be used as an instrument to open China to his teachings, then so be it."
(4.5 stars) When the Ibis, a "blackbirder," leaves Calcutta and sets out across the Bay of Bengal carrying "indentured migrants," the seas darken and become stormy. As the ship tosses and conditions deteriorate, the ship becomes a microcosm for life on land, full of tumult and unexpected twists of fate, as each person's heart is laid bare. Everybody aboard is escaping from something, so anxious to put their problems behind them that they see no choice but to submit to the atrocious living conditions and sometimes sadistic overseers.

Set in India in 1838, at the outset of the three-year Opium War between the British and the Chinese, this epic novel follows several characters from different levels of society who become united through their personal lives aboard the ship and, more generally, through their connections to the opium and slave trades. Deeti Singh, married as a young teenager to a man whose dependence on opium makes him an inadequate husband and provider, is forced to work on the family's opium field outside Ghazipur by herself, though she fears her sadistic brother-in-law. Zachary Reid, a young sailor from Baltimore has left America because his status as an octoroon has led to constant harassment by other American sailors.

At the opposite end of the scale is Benjamin Burnham, who owns the Ibis and engages in the opium trade. Formerly a slave trader, Burnham now transports exiled prisoners and coolies, and he has acquired enormous wealth and a lavish lifestyle impossible for him in England. Among his acquaintances is Raja Neel Rattan Halder, the zemindar of Raskali, who, accustomed to the unimaginable opulence that upper caste Brahmins assume is their right by birth, has paid little attention to his dwindling resources, and he has now accumulated debts.

Ghosh depicts the lives of these characters and their acquaintances in extravagant and thoroughly researched detail, bringing to life Deeti's misery, the expectations for her within her husband's family, and the customs which she must honor, for example. He fully describes buildings, their contents, bath facilities, dining customs, religious practices, the inside of a slave ship, and even the importance of omens, but he never forgets his obligation as a story-teller, continuously presenting one highly dramatic moment after another. Stories of piracy and cruelty, often growing out of the opium trade, exist side by side with more personal stories of love and nobility. Ghosh's use of local patois creates a rich and colorful atmosphere, and episodes of humor live side by side with episodes of terror. The first book in a projected "Ibis trilogy," this historical novel pulses with life, and as the novel comes to a satisfying close, Ghosh keeps several doors open, suggesting the direction he will take with this novel's sequel. n Mary Whipple

The Glass Palace: A Novel
The Shadow Lines: A Novel
The Circle of Reason
Incendiary Circumstances: A Chronicle of the Turmoil of our Times
The Hungry Tide: A Novel

One of his best
Amitav Ghosh's books create an ambience that doesn't belong to this era.

This books deals with the genesis of the opium trade, the way it grew and how it helped the East India Company use the riches generated by it to control not just India but also others. Ghosh's ability to create a highly detailed picture of those times at various societal levels and their interactions (with all their polictical intrigues and social interactions) points to well done, in-depth research on the subject. His maturity as a writer is evident since the book never becomes judgmental.

The book involves the reader at various levels - as an engaging story and as a historical novel.

I wouldn't like to reveal much of the story and rob you of your enjoyment but this is one book which is sure to leave you with a sense of fulfilment. It is like a rich, royal literary feast.