Chinaman

Reviews

A Great Cricket Novel. For a game without much great fiction, that's a reason to applaud with drums - and forget the rules the marshals impose at Lord's It's funny and original, extremely revealing about Sri Lanka, and as for the cricket, in the author's own words: "If you can't understand why anyone would watch, let alone obsess over this dull game, then this is the book for you." Brilliant At an early stage, I will confess that I was very close to typing 'Pradeep Mathew Cricinfo' into Google just to check whether there was indeed a Sri Lankan cricketer of that name ... that may be a recommendation of the book; it may be a condemnation. But I have always had a soft spot for Sri Lankan cricket A hugely entertaining read Confident and poignant debut The strength of the book lies in its energy, its mixture of humour and heartwrenching emotion, its twisting narrative, its playful use of cricketing facts and characters, and its occasional blazing anger about what Sri Lanka has done to itself... Carries real weight...a mixture of, say, CLR James, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Fernando Pessoa and Sri Lankan arrack...essential to anyone with a taste for maverick genius Karunatilaka has a real lightness of touch. He mixes humour and violence with the same deftness with which his protagonist mixes drinks Chinaman is a debut bristling with energy and confidence, a quixotic novel that is both an elegy to lost ambitions and a paean to madcap dreams Chinaman's free-wheeling, zany tempo is part of its charm too. Its picaresque action, mainly based in Colombo and narrated in short bite-sized chunks, gives a vibrant comic pulse to Sri Lankan life, even though Karunatilaka's portrait of the country is scathing...it confirms that cricket, a game that is largely played in the head and inhabits a bizarrely detailed parallel world to our own, is ideally suited to the purposes of fiction Expand reviews