Impressions of “The Impressionist”: A Review of my first Hari Kunzru Novel

The Impressionist by Hari Kunzru


My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This book was recommended to me by a well-traveled, foreign-policy-savvy author friend of mine, and I found it to be one of my favorite books this year. It’s a smart, wry, vivid, take on the hero’s journey, where the hero is a fair-skinned Indian who seeks to pass as an Englishman during the Raj era.

The way the narrator follows the nameless (or rather, many-named) protagonist reminded me of Patrick Suskind’s Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, in that he’s somewhat of a tabula rasa, an observer of society who writes its customs on himself. Yet this narrator allows itself humorous detours into the secondary characters’ POVs, sampling opinions and needling egos, gradually constructing an emotional portrait of what colonialism feels like if you’re the colonized.

Kunzru loves irony, and without spoiling the ending, I’ll add that it is one of the “be careful what you wish for” variety. In a way, that’s how I felt about this book, too, and why I didn’t give it five stars–the story flowed into a tragically logical climax, and allowed us to see some vengeance on the characters we loved to hate. Yet when I closed the book, those satisfying choices–Kunzru’s characters, sensibility, and deft plotting–all added up to a slightly empty ending. It may have been the point, but part of me longed for the unapologetic beauty I found in the last pages of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, another big book about colonialism.

I was excited to discover Hari Kunzru, and if I find myself staring at another of his novels in the bookstore, I’ll probably pick it up.





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