SOURCE: "Out on a Limb in India," in The Spectator, Vol. 28, No. 8860, May 30, 1998, p. 34.

[In the following review, Carnell offers a largely positive assessment of Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard.]

Reclined beneath a rickety electric ceiling fan, in his stifling family home in the northern Indian town of Shahkot, Sampath Chawla suddenly fears that it might fall, 'smashing his face as flat as a child's drawing'. Kiran Desai's fable-like first novel [Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard] is based humorously on the extraordinary attempt made by this dreamily indolent and reluctant young post office clerk to emerge, as it were, into a more three-dimensional space than his background and talents have destined him for. He gets himself sacked by doing a bizarre impromptu striptease at a wedding. Then, hectored by his bank clerk father to seek work at the local 'Utterly Butterly Delicious Butler Factory', he climbs a guava...