Ice-Candy-Man , livre ebook

Bapsi Sidhwa
Ice-Candy-Man

PENGUIN BOOKS
Contents
About the Author
Praise for Bapsi Sidhwa
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Acknowledgements
Copyright
PENGUIN BOOKS
ICE-CANDY-MAN
Distinguished international writer Bapsi Sidhwa lives in America but travels frequently to the Indian subcontinent. She has published five novels: An American Brat , Cracking India , Pakistani Bride , The Crow-Eaters and Ice-Candy-Man , and has been translated into German, French, Italian and Russian.
Among her many honours Sidhwa received the Lila Wallace-Reader s Digest Writer s Award in 1994, the US National Endowment for the Arts grant in 1994, the Sitara-i-Imtiaz , Pakistan s national honour in the arts, and the LiBeraturepreis in Germany. Sidhwa has also held the prestigious Bunting Fellowship at Radcliffe/Harvard.
Sidhwa, who was on the advisory committee to Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto on Women s Development, has taught at Columbia University, University of Houston and Mount Holyoke College, and currently holds the Fanny Hurst position at Brandeis University.
Ice-Candy-Man (a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and a Quality Paperback Book Club selection), has been made into the film 1947 - Earth by noted Canadian director Deepa Mehta.
Praise for Bapsi Sidhwa
Bapsi Sidhwa deals with the partition of India, a subject as harrowing as the Holocaust. Before our disbelieving eyes, she performs the remarkable feat of bringing together the ribald farce of Parsee family life and the stark drama and horrors of the riots and massacres of 1947.
She has achieved the impossible through one masterly stroke creating a child s world of home and games in the park amidst a motley company. At the center of this world is the child, Lenny. For all that she bears the bitter burden of history on her eight-year-old-shoulders, Lenny is not allowed to become merely the embodiment of an abstract idea. Sidhwa s triumph lies in creating characters so rich in hilarious and accurate detail, so alive and active, that long after one has closed the book, they continue to perform their extraordinary and wonderful feats before our eyes.
- Dawn
If you wish to relive the Lahore of the 40s and 50s, go no further. In Ice-Candy-Man the tale is told with skill and craftsmanship unrivaled in the sub-continent.
- She
Sidhwa s humour comes in pungent one-liners and her style is highly visual.
- India Today
Sidhwa captures the turmoil of the times, with a brilliant combination of individual growing-up pains and the collective anguish of a newly independent but divided country. Sidhwa s work-particularly the dehumanizing effects of communalism she movingly reveals in Ice-Candy-Man -is painfully relevant to our present day India.
- Economic Times
It may be that the atrocities of 1947 are best seen through the innocent, na ve eyes of a child, who has no Hindu, Muslim or Sikh axe to grind . . . Lenny is free both from the prejudices of religion, and from the prejudices against women, and the constraints she will be subject to as she grows older. The authorial voice (is) a powerful voice of hindsight.
-Ralph Crane
Bapsi Sidhwa cannot be easily labeled . . . She cannot be categorized as just a Pakistani novelist, she is much more versatile. Lame Lenny can be related to Oscar of Gunther Grass s Tin Drum. There are books about boys growing up (Mark Twain s Huck Finn ), however Sidhwa s novel is unique as it establishes the girl-child s point of view.
-R.K. Dhawan
Sidhwa s evocation of a Lahore childhood, seen through the eyes of a precocious child called Lenny, is as sweet and enticing as the popsicles that the hero of her novel sells. It is a passionate account of Partition told through the cooling mists of Parsi humour.
- Parsiana
Lenny can be compared to the persona that Chaucer adopts in his Prologue to The Canterbury Tales , rendering credibility by being almost a part of the reader s consciousness . . . With the wonder of a child she observes social change and human behaviour, her persona a source of sharp irony.
-Novi Kapadia
Sidhwa s Ice-Candy-Man is a bold experiment in narrative strategies and time, in which the unspeakable horrors of communal violence are told mainly from a little girl s point of view.
- Times Literary Supplement ( TLS )
In this rich, original novel Sidhwa contrives, without fake na vete, to tell the story through the eyes of a sharp, inquisitive eight-year-old girl Lenny, who has a crippled foot and is cared for by a beautiful young Ayah. Lenny is established so firmly as a truthful witness that the mounting unease in Lahore, the riots, fires and brutal massacres become real through the child s experience. The colossal upheaval of partition, when cities were allotted to India or Pakistan like pieces on a chess-board, and their frightened inhabitants were often savagely uprooted, runs like an earth tremor through this thoughtful novel.
-Sylvia Clayton
With skill and sympathy, and a delightful sense of humour, Bapsi Sidhwa shows the small girl Lenny growing up in comfort and tranquillity. The book s many characters all come to exuberant life, exhibiting the odd tastes and unpredictable behaviour of real individuals.
- London Magazine
Sidhwa s Rabelaisian language and humour are enormously refreshing, especially in the context of modern Indian fiction, which has tended rather towards the prim and stilted. In Ice-Candy-Man , as in her previous novels, she succeeds in transmitting into English much of the spirit of Punjabi language and culture, which is nothing if not earthy. But her prose is also both delicate and precise in its imagery and descriptions, with words chosen as carefully as pieces of inlay in a marble wall.
- The Literary Review
Like all Sidhwa s work, the novel contains a rich undercurrent of legend and folklore. It combines Sidhwa s affectionate admiration for her own community with a compassion for the dispossessed. Her own childhood memories give the novel further depth and resonance.
- The Oxford Companion To Twentieth-Century Literature in English
A fluent, fast moving narrative of wit and wisdom.
- Irish Times
A born storyteller, an affectionate, shrewd observer . . . she writes with authority and flair.
- New Statesman
Ice-Candy-Man is extremely taut, highly sensitive and its heart-rending realism is best brought out with the familiar elements. The treatment, much to the fulfillment of the reader, is not only delightfully different but also inimitably exclusive . . . Sidhwa s somewhat Joycian insight into child psychology and keen observation of child behaviour is what makes the book so compelling and virtually unputdownable.
- Miscellany
The brilliantly created Indian characters in this novel are made with a real face, that turns at times into a mask of horror and at others into a peal of laughter . . . Of all the marvellous people brought to life in this novel there is one who signifies resistance to change and uses the chaos around him for his own malicious ends. And so in the end there is one person who comes out unscathed and no wiser from the brutal pain of Indian independence: Ice-Candy-Man.
-Weekly Mail
As the ambiguities and contradictions residing in the political situation in the Punjab are explored in the course of Lenny s narrative, so examples multiply of Sidhwa s talent for fusing broad humour and trenchant criticism, concrete observation and imaginative insight, the realities of everyday existence and the abstractions of politics and religion.
- Third World Quarterly
Without a word of protestation or preaching and without histrionics, Sidhwa has written one of the most powerful indictments of the riots which occurred during the Partition.
- World Literature Today
The novel is about the slow awaking of the child heroine both to sexuality and grown-up pains and pleasures and to the particular historical disaster that overwhelms her world . . . compulsively readable.
- Observer
A powerful and dramatic novelist.
- The Times
Sidhwa, a Parsee living in Pakistan, is a rarity even in swiftly-changing Asia-a candid, forthright, balanced woman novelist. Her twentieth century view of Indian life can only be compared to V.S. Naipaul s. Sidhwa is among the most invigorating Indian writers.
- Bloomsbury Review
Ice-Candy-Man is a novel in which heartbreak coexists with slapstick . . . and jokes give way to lines of glowing beauty ( the moonlight settles like a layer of ashes over Lahore ). The author s capacity for bringing an assortment of characters vividly to life is enviable. In reducing the Partition to the perceptions of a polio-ridden child, a girl who tries to wrench out her tongue because it is unable to lie, Bapsi Sidhwa has given us a memorable book, one that confirms her reputation as Pakistan s finest English language novelist.
- New York Times Book Review
Bapsi Sidhwa has turned her gaze upon the domestic comedy of a Pakistani family in the 1940s and somehow managed to evoke the great political upheavals of the age . . . and I am particularly touched by the way she has held the wicked world up to the mirror of a young girl s mind and caught so much that is lyrical and significant . . . a mysterious and wonderful novel.
- Washington Post , Book World
Much has been written about the holocaust that followed the Partition of India in 1947. But seldom has that story been told as touchingly, as convincingly, or as horrifyingly as it has been by novelist Bapsi Sidhwa, seeing it through the eyes of young Lenny . . . there is great humanity in this