Sea of Poppies: A Novel | 
 enlarge | Author: Amitav Ghosh
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Category: Book
List Price: $26.00
Buy New: $15.73
You Save: $10.27 (40%)
New (38) Collectible (3) from $15.73
Avg. Customer Rating:  25 reviews
Sales Rank: 314
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 528
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.7
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 6.5 x 1.3
ISBN: 0374174229
Dewey Decimal Number: 823.914
EAN: 9780374174224
ASIN: 0374174229
Publication Date: October 14, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: All products brand new. Exactly as Shown at Amazon.com
|
| Also Available In:
|
| Similar Items:
|
| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize At the heart of this vibrant saga is a vast ship, the Ibis. Its destiny is a tumultuous voyage across the Indian Ocean; its purpose, to fight China’s vicious nineteenth-century Opium Wars. As for the crew, they are a motley array of sailors and stowaways, coolies and convicts. In a time of colonial upheaval, fate has thrown together a diverse cast of Indians and Westerners, from a bankrupt raja to a widowed tribeswoman, from a mulatto American freedman to a freespirited French orphan. As their old family ties are washed away, they, like their historical counterparts, come to view themselves as jahaj-bhais, or ship-brothers. An unlikely dynasty is born, which will span continents, races, and generations. The vast sweep of this historical adventure spans the lush poppy fields of the Ganges, the rolling high seas, the exotic backstreets of Canton. But it is the panorama of characters, whose diaspora encapsulates the vexed colonial history of the East itself, that makes Sea of Poppies so breathtakingly alive—a masterpiece from one of the world’s finest novelists.
|
| Customer Reviews: Read 20 more reviews...
 A new interest in historical fiction November 16, 2008
After a stint exclusively reading history, I decided to branch out and try a fictional take on the past. That was a good decision. This fictional account on the South Asian diaspora of the 19th century added texture to facts that might have seemed flat otherwise.
The abundant sailor jargon slowed the reading down but convinced me that the narrator indeed was from a different, long-gone world.
Finally, the fictional turns of the plot keep the story engaging through the last page and likely into the next two installments of the trilogy.
 English please November 9, 2008
2 out of 4 found this review helpful
I love Amitav Gosh and his books and I bought this one with great expectations. I could not finish it. His too frequent use of slang and vernacular makes it difficult to go with the book and get carried away with the story. Yes,some of the characters are endearing and the plot is intriguing but this endless word game is off putting. Hopefully the second volume of the announced trilogy will be in straight English...
 Five Stars if Part I; Three if a Stand-Alone November 5, 2008
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
It's good to hear (though it's unconfirmed,) that "Sea of Poppies," is part one of a projected trilogy, because although it's a beautifully styled (I'd say extravagantly written,) completely engaging, well researched work of historical fiction, it closes without a satisfactory end. Three stars as a stand-alone, (despite its many merits, and because of the ending;) five stars if it is, indeed, installment one.
Beautifully styled - extravagantly written. I've not read other works by Amitav Ghosh, so I'm not familiar with his stylistic strategies, but "The Sea of Poppies," is written with the love of language I've come to expect from Indian novelists. Mr. Ghosh has captured both the English and the "Hing-lish," of the Victorian Age, and enriched it with a delightful and descriptive patois and pidgin. I don't know how much Mr. Ghosh has invented whole cloth, and how much is a result of research, but it's hugely entertaining, and perhaps near genius. Yes, it does leave you slightly at sea in terms of full understanding, but I find that to be part of the charm. (I've nodded my head in befuddlement in many countries.) It reminds me of the language recorded in the Booker Prize winning, Sacred Hunger" by Barry Unsworth, another beautifully written novel about fretful times.
Well researched. Even as a student of India, the scenes and details of "The Sea of Poppies," were new to me. Village life, city life; the tics, prejudices, and beliefs of the hoi polloi as well as the ruling classes; the facts and lore of the opium trade, the merchant life, and life at sea are all well limned and thoroughly convincing - and enchanting, though not in the whimsical sense that word is usually employed to describe. The description of a walk through an opium refining plant is worth the price of admission. Mr Ghosh engages all the readers' senses in his detailed portrayals of character as well as location. You can smell the ship, "Ibis," not pleasant, but...
Totally engaging. I can't say as I experienced a dull moment. It's a romance, an adventure, a history all combined with a colorful cast of characters and exotic settings.
I admit it; I'm too lazy to continuously look up all these foreign words. November 2, 2008
8 out of 9 found this review helpful
I see this novel has received stellar reviews, so I am the only one, so far, to disagree. The problem for me was the frequent use of foreign language or jargon that was impossible to follow. Example from Page 45: "This was India, where it didn't serve for a sahib to be taken for a clodpoll of a griffin: if he wasn't fly to what was going on, it'd be all dickey with him, mighty jildee. This was no Baltimore - this was a jungle here, with biscobras in the grass and wanderoos in the trees. If he, Zachary, wasn't to be diddled and taken for a flat, he would have to learn to gubbrow the natives with a word or two of the zubben." Throughout the book there is much use of language that is simply incomprehensible. There is a glossary, but after a while, reading this book became too much like work and too little like pleasure, having to constantly look up meanings. Guess I'm just too lazy, but perhaps there's such a thing as being too authentic. Also, when the story strays into too much detail about sailing and ship jargon, I grew somewhat bored. I never was able to finish but, perhaps, I'll give it another try sometime when the electricity goes out or I'm held captive by a kidnapper with only this book to read.
Epic tragicomedy about globalization, at a personal level November 1, 2008
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
Other reviews can give you a good idea of the book's plot, and the wonderful quality of the writing. I was especially struck that nearly every character misunderstands someone else's language, motivations or both -- you can almost pick any two of the main characters at random, and find some example of a miscommunication between them. Don't worry, the same Anglo-Indian or lascar (Asian sailor) slang that puzzles you is puzzling some character in the book. Even the communication between the American hero and the young French woman who seems to be his romantic interest is a comedy of errors. Having spent a big chunk of my life in a multicultural environment at work and at home, it was easy to identify with what they were going through. If you haven't yet had that experience in real life, the novel provides is a very colorful illustration of it.
As others have noted, if you weren't familiar already with the British opium trade, this book will open your eyes (or at least start to; opium's impact on the Chinese population is touched on only briefly in this part of the story). I'm not sure that, as one reviewer suggests, opium is intended to be a metaphor for oil today, but the opium story *is* a good example of how free trade and globalization dogma affect people. Ghosh's Ph.D. in social anthropology no doubt helps him with this aspect of the plot structure.
At the time of the novel, as now, many people in English-speaking countries believed in the idea that each country had a "comparative advantage" in selling something, and that more trade was better. Ghosh briefly alludes to this theory, put forward by economist David Ricardo, through the mouth of one of his characters. The British wanted to buy Chinese tea, silk and porcelain -- China's comparative advantage. Problem was, China wasn't interested in buying anything from the British. They refused to trade unless the British paid in silver. The British regarded this as a block on free trade. Since opium could grow well in British India, the British hit on the idea that the Chinese should buy Indian opium, paid for with trade in Chinese goods. The fact that opium is addictive made this arrangement all the more brilliant, from the British point of view. Ultimately (and after the action in this novel), the British would attack China with military force, to "enforce" the principle of free trade.
Ghosh shows that being an opium trader (or one's wife) didn't prevent you from being pompous, self-righteous and moralizing. He also vividly describes how this trade created hardship for local farmers in India -- the British required that growing opium be given higher priority than growing food crops. Something like that happens in modern globalization, too. A poor country borrows money from the World Bank or IMF. The loans are in dollars or euro, but almost inevitably the country lacks the foreign currency it needs to make payments on the loan. So the IMF requires the country to prioritize growing crops for export, rather than for feeding its own people, since export sales generate foreign currency. (BTW, that same 19th Century comparative advantage theory is still taught today in Econ 101, too, though the 2008 Nobel Prize in economics was awarded for work that showed it's not so accurate.) Ghosh's novel is an easy but affecting lesson in the modern global economy, and an important one for its portrayal of globalization's impact on individual lives.
The opium scenes and some others are harrowing. But Ghosh leaves hints here and there that some of the most sympathetic characters do find their way to happy endings. After I finished the book, I had to take a break of a couple of days before I could start another book of fiction. The characters were so vivid, I found myself thinking about them during the day, and then realizing with disappointment that the book was over. It's the vivid plot and great characterizations, more than any economics lesson, that make this book so much fun. Like everyone else, I eagerly await the next installment.
|
|
|
