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Summary
Summary
Shortlisted for the Booker Prize, Animal's People is by turns a profane, scathingly funny, and piercingly honest tale of a boy so badly damaged by the poisons released during a chemical plant leak that he walks on all fours.
Summary
In this Booker-shortlisted novel, Indra Sinha's profane, furious, and scathingly funny narrator delivers an unflinching look at what it means to be human.
I used to be human once. So I'm told. I don't remember it myself, but people who knew me when I was small say I walked on two feet, just like a human being...
Ever since he can remember, Animal has gone on all fours, his back twisted beyond repair by the catastrophic events of "that night" when a burning fog of poison smoke from the local factory blazed out over the town of Khaufpur, and the Apocalypse visited his slums. Now just turned seventeen and well schooled in street work, he lives by his wits, spending his days jamisponding (spying) on town officials and looking after the elderly nun who raised him, Ma Franci. His nights are spent fantasizing about Nisha, the girlfriend of the local resistance leader, and wondering what it must be like to get laid.
When Elli Barber, a young American doctor, arrives in Khaufpur to open a free clinic for the still suffering townsfolk--only to find herself struggling to convince them that she isn't there to do the dirty work of the Kampani--Animal gets caught up in a web of intrigues, scams, and plots with the unabashed aim of turning events to his own advantage.
Profane, piercingly honest, and scathingly funny, Animal's People illuminates a dark world shot through with flashes of joy and lunacy. A stunning tale of an unforgettable character, it is an unflinching look at what it means to be human: the wounds that never heal and a spirit that will not be quenched.
Author Notes
Indra Sinha was born in India. His work of non-fiction, The Cybergypsies , and his first novel, The Death of Mr Love , met with widespread critical acclaim. He lives in France.
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Orphaned Bhopal slum resident Animal, who "used to be human" before an industrial chemical accident left his bones "twisted like a hairpin," narrates in a rich argot this tense and absorbing Brit import, shortlisted for the Booker in 2007. Animal, who walks on all fours, focuses on the events surrounding the impending trial of the "Kampani" responsible for the accident. He falls in with a group led by famous musician Somraj; Somraj's daughter, Nisha; and Nisha's boyfriend, "Saint Zafar," who devotes his life to fighting the Kampani and caring for the poor. Tensions mount as suspicious "Amrikan" doctor Elli Barber opens a clinic in the slums, lawyers from the Kampani arrive in Khaufpur to negotiate a settlement, and Animal, desperately in love with Nisha, copes with his desires and frustrations. While some of the supporting characters remain one-dimensional, Animal's voice--a melange of grit, pointed social criticism, profanity and lust--brings to life what could have become a tendentious parable, and his struggles personalize the novel's grand themes of secrecy, betrayal and unexpected acts of love and kindness. Sinha balances big issues with an intimate depiction of life at its bleakest. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
Take a feisty young cripple, connect him to one of the world's worst industrial disasters, and you have Sinha's extraordinary, incandescent second novel, a Man Booker Prize finalist. Thousands died after an explosion at the Union Carbide pesticide plant in Bhopal, India, in 1985. The British-Indian Sinha (The Death of Mr. Love, 2004) uses the catastrophe as a springboard; it's now years later, but residents of Khaufpur (his name for Bhopal) are still dying from poisons as they battle the Kampani (the company). Grim material, but this is not a grim novel, thanks to Animal, Sinha's narrator, a 19-year-old Khaufpuri. Abandoned on the night of the accident, he was raised in an orphanage; at age six, pains twisted his spine, forcing him to walk on all fours. He left the orphanage for the streets; the name Animal (a child's taunt) became his badge of pride. Smart, tough, sneaky, horny and improbably upbeat, Animal is an astonishing creation with a bawdy, layered narrative voice, seasoned with scraps of French and Hindi. His story is inextricably linked to that of his wounded yet still hustling city. The plot revolves around the campaign against the Kampani waged by Zafar, a saintly young college graduate beloved by the poor. The other main characters are Zafar's sweetheart, Nisha, coveted by Animal, and her father Somraj, a famous singer until the poisons destroyed his lungs. Zafar's campaign is complicated by the arrival of Elli Barber, an attractive American doctor opening a free clinic. Suspecting she is a company stooge, Zafar imposes a boycott. Meanwhile, Animal is working to detach Nisha from her man, and why not? He's capable of devotion; he's got a fine torso; and he's hung like a horse. There's a gripping climax as company lawyers arrive and Zafar's hunger strike threatens to kill him. A double triumph for Sinha: The plight of the world's powerless has seldom been conveyed more powerfully, while Animal is destined to be one of fiction's immortals. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Can a novel about the 1984 chemical apocalypse in Bhopal, India, be funny? Yes, when the story is imaginatively told in the voice of a determined, strangely gifted 19-year-old survivor. An infant on that night, when a monstrous cloud of poison gas erupted from a pesticide plant, he was orphaned and eventually crippled by the disaster, his spine so severely bent he is forced to walk on all fours. Taunted and called Animal, he lives a hardscrabble life. Befriended by kind Nisha, Animal falls in love, even though she loves Zafar, the virtuous leader of a protest movement demanding reparation from the American chemical company. When an American opens a free clinic, Zafar calls for a boycott, certain that the clinic is in cahoots with the chemical company, but Animal can't stay away. Writing with both serious intent and exuberant satirical humor, Sinha tells an antic, ribald, and searing tale of greed and heroism. Short-listed for the Booker Prize, Sinha's daring farce asks what it means to be human, rekindles compassion for the still uncompensated victims of the real-life catastrophe, and celebrates the resiliency of love and goodness in the poorest and most poisoned of places.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2008 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
A chemical disaster disfigured this novel's narrator. THE Web site of Khaufpur, India, makes much of the city's scenery and sparkling lakes, even its quaint institutions. One such, the Lazies Club, is dedicated to the art of inertia: seated members take precedence over those standing, who are "obliged to pay for the drinks." Aside from a brief reference to an unspecified past calamity, there's no hint that life in Khaufpur is anything less than blissful. Or that Khaufpur does not, in fact, exist. Khaufpur - and its very convincing Web site - is the creation of Indra Sinha, a former advertising copywriter, who uses it as a stand-in for Bhopal, the site of one of the worst industrial accidents in history, the 1984 gas leak from a Union Carbide chemical plant that caused the deaths of thousands of people and sickened hundreds of thousands more. It is also the setting for his fiercely polemical - and unexpectedly bawdy - novel "Animal's People," a finalist for the 2007 Man Booker Prize that reveals not a paradise but a blighted city. Sinha's narrator is a 19-year-old orphan, born a few days before the disaster, whose spine has become so twisted that he must walk on all fours. Known to everyone simply as Animal, he rejects sympathy, spouts profanity and obsesses about sex. Styling himself a hard-boiled realist, Animal embraces his cruel nickname, claiming he has "no wish" to be a human being. It's all bravado, of course. Although he says grimly, "I do not know what name you could give to the things I have done," he's really just a small-time scam artist, doing what he can to survive on the streets. Fittingly, Animal's lust, not his desire for justice, initially drives the plot. Animal pines for a girl whose boyfriend is campaigning against the company responsible for the gas leak. When a beautiful American doctor opens a clinic offering free medical treatment, these two activists, suspecting the American is secretly gathering information to discredit the company's opponents, easily persuade Animal to spy on her. Sinha is an effervescent writer, but he endows his characters with quirks rather than fully realized interior lives. And his forays into surrealism can be more disorienting than enlightening: Animal's caretaker is a demented French nun who hears anything other than her native language only as grunts; among Animal's acquaintances is a two-headed fetus in a jar, who begs Animal to free him. The American doctor is a caricature, a supposed idealist who has taken the time to learn fluent Hindi yet seems oblivious to the customs and strictures of local society - she wears skin-tight jeans and curses in casual conversation. Writing about devastation without sinking to sentimentality is a treacherous task. Early on, Animal sneers at a journalist, accusing him of coming to Khaufpur "to suck our stories from us, so strangers in far-off countries can marvel there's so much pain in the world." Later an Indian doctor, describing the disaster to his American colleague, confides: "On that night the moon was two-thirds full. It was shaped like a tear and as it appeared through the clouds of gas, it was the color of blood." The American's response is equally hackneyed: "I sat there drinking his whiskey listening to him reduce the terror of dying people to a moon in a second-rate poem." Sinha veers between comedy and tragedy, awkwardly stuffing his story with improbable high jinks. Yet every now and then his prose achieves a plainspoken lyricism that brings his subject into sudden focus. At night, Animal retreats to his improvised home in the abandoned factory. "Listen, how quiet," he remarks. "No bird song. No hoppers in the grass. No bee hum. Insects can't survive here." The company made "wonderful poisons, ... so good it's impossible to get rid of them, after all these years they're still doing their work." Sinha's fiercely polemical story is set in a fictionalized Bhopal. Ligaya Mishan is on the editorial staff of The New Yorker.
Library Journal Review
Last year's Man Booker Prize winner is a story with a message: Animal is a teenage boy who lives on the streets of the Indian city of Khaufpur. He goes around on all fours since his spine is badly damaged; he cannot walk normally. As an infant, he was one of the thousands of victims of a poison gas leak at an American-owned company, here just called "the Kampani." Animal also lost his parents "that night" (as the local people refer to the horrible event). Animal has a lively mind and a way with words, some of them angry and profane, some of them bitterly funny, as he gets caught up in the struggle of those in Khaufpur who seek long-delayed justice from the Kampani. Sinha, who frequently contributes to bhopal.net, has clearly based his story on the human and environmental disaster at the Union Carbide factory in Bhopal in 1984. The result is a gripping novel that also reminds us of a continuing real-life tragedy. Recommended for all larger collections.-Leslie Patterson, Brown Univ. Lib., Providence, RI (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
New York Review of Books Review
A chemical disaster disfigured this novel's narrator. THE Web site of Khaufpur, India, makes much of the city's scenery and sparkling lakes, even its quaint institutions. One such, the Lazies Club, is dedicated to the art of inertia: seated members take precedence over those standing, who are "obliged to pay for the drinks." Aside from a brief reference to an unspecified past calamity, there's no hint that life in Khaufpur is anything less than blissful. Or that Khaufpur does not, in fact, exist. Khaufpur - and its very convincing Web site - is the creation of Indra Sinha, a former advertising copywriter, who uses it as a stand-in for Bhopal, the site of one of the worst industrial accidents in history, the 1984 gas leak from a Union Carbide chemical plant that caused the deaths of thousands of people and sickened hundreds of thousands more. It is also the setting for his fiercely polemical - and unexpectedly bawdy - novel "Animal's People," a finalist for the 2007 Man Booker Prize that reveals not a paradise but a blighted city. Sinha's narrator is a 19-year-old orphan, born a few days before the disaster, whose spine has become so twisted that he must walk on all fours. Known to everyone simply as Animal, he rejects sympathy, spouts profanity and obsesses about sex. Styling himself a hard-boiled realist, Animal embraces his cruel nickname, claiming he has "no wish" to be a human being. It's all bravado, of course. Although he says grimly, "I do not know what name you could give to the things I have done," he's really just a small-time scam artist, doing what he can to survive on the streets. Fittingly, Animal's lust, not his desire for justice, initially drives the plot. Animal pines for a girl whose boyfriend is campaigning against the company responsible for the gas leak. When a beautiful American doctor opens a clinic offering free medical treatment, these two activists, suspecting the American is secretly gathering information to discredit the company's opponents, easily persuade Animal to spy on her. Sinha is an effervescent writer, but he endows his characters with quirks rather than fully realized interior lives. And his forays into surrealism can be more disorienting than enlightening: Animal's caretaker is a demented French nun who hears anything other than her native language only as grunts; among Animal's acquaintances is a two-headed fetus in a jar, who begs Animal to free him. The American doctor is a caricature, a supposed idealist who has taken the time to learn fluent Hindi yet seems oblivious to the customs and strictures of local society - she wears skin-tight jeans and curses in casual conversation. Writing about devastation without sinking to sentimentality is a treacherous task. Early on, Animal sneers at a journalist, accusing him of coming to Khaufpur "to suck our stories from us, so strangers in far-off countries can marvel there's so much pain in the world." Later an Indian doctor, describing the disaster to his American colleague, confides: "On that night the moon was two-thirds full. It was shaped like a tear and as it appeared through the clouds of gas, it was the color of blood." The American's response is equally hackneyed: "I sat there drinking his whiskey listening to him reduce the terror of dying people to a moon in a second-rate poem." Sinha veers between comedy and tragedy, awkwardly stuffing his story with improbable high jinks. Yet every now and then his prose achieves a plainspoken lyricism that brings his subject into sudden focus. At night, Animal retreats to his improvised home in the abandoned factory. "Listen, how quiet," he remarks. "No bird song. No hoppers in the grass. No bee hum. Insects can't survive here." The company made "wonderful poisons, ... so good it's impossible to get rid of them, after all these years they're still doing their work." Sinha's fiercely polemical story is set in a fictionalized Bhopal. Ligaya Mishan is on the editorial staff of The New Yorker.