My Revolutions

February 25, 2008
Simon Prebble, a consummate professional among narrators, plays Kunzru's middle-aged protagonist, who relates his adolescent-into-adulthood journey that has gradually brought him to his current state of misery. From the outset Prebble helps structure the kind of suspense and tension Kunzru created so superbly in The Impressionist
. The story opens at Christopher's 50th birthday party. But he is no longer Christopher; “Michael Frame” now leads a yuppie suburban family life he describes meticulously and with witty, bitter irony. He exists in a sort of “mental crouch,” waiting, knowing that “even now, in days, or even hours, my life here will be over.” Initiated as a 1960s teen into a counterculture, anti-Vietnam, anti-imperialist commune, he falls for the gutsy, freewheeling Anna. Wanting to win her, he ends up blowing up bathrooms and buildings. But he is forever dogged by a creepy childhood acquaintance named Miles, who, in the end, blackmails him into working for the people he always bitterly opposed. Kunzru's descriptions of places and events are sometimes too long and Christopher's lifetime attachment to Anna is a bit hard to swallow. But Kunzru delivers a gripping tale. Simultaneous release with the Dutton hardcover.

Starred review from December 15, 2007
It's the 1970s, and Chris Carver, briefly imprisoned for participating in a demonstration and increasingly disillusioned with the British revolutionaries with whom he's been involved since the 1960s, goes on the run, assuming the identity of one Michael Frame. Decades later, an ex-inmate of Chris tracks him down and pressures him to provide false evidence against another former comrade, now about to gain a powerful position in the British government. Unwilling to cooperate, Chris runs away again, this time to France, where he believes his old cohort, the supposedly dead Anna Addison, is hiding. As Kunzru ("The Impressionist") shows how the present-day Michael's comfortable middle-class life has been interrupted, he reconstructs Chris's life story, focusing on his early interest in protests and his arrest while a student at the London School of Economics. With these simultaneous stories of Chris's early life and his evasion of his true identity, Kunzru creates a graphic and realistic portrait of the 1960s and beyond. Exciting, dramatic, and enthralling; recommended for all collections. [See Prepub Alert, "LJ" 9/1/07.]Jim Coan, SUNY Coll. at Oneonta Lib.

Copyright 2007 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

January 1, 2008
After encountering a shadowy figure from his past, Michael Frame must confront the lie that has become his life and his identity. He is not, as his wife and stepdaughter believe, a bookish, doting family man whose past was of little consequence. Instead, he was Chris Carver, a revolutionary and small-time terrorist who changed his identity and fled England in the 1970s after participating in a series of escalating radical events with the August 14th Group. Kunzru draws together the events of Chriss youth through a patchwork of characters: his fervently radical lover, who dies tragically; the charismatic ringleader Sean Ward;a host of free-love hippies; and a photojournalist who just happens to reappear throughout Chriss life to set him straight. Kunzru infuses his novel with a powerful pedagogy on the leftist movement of Vietnam Warera Britain. Through his sharp, descriptive narrative, the reader envisions a time of new thinking, passionate radicals in their youth, and a political climate ripe for change.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2008, American Library Association.)