![]() ![]() The anger is a primal force, the sadness wild and raw. This is a world of magnified and dark emotion. It plunged me into a world so vivid and capricious, that when I finished, I found something had shifted and changed within myself. ![]() As I read this novel, that also portrays a very tender marriage and the life of a Goan family in Bombay, it drowned me. 'Pinto chases the elusive portrait of a mother who simply said of herself that she was mad. Parts of it are extremely funny, and its pages are filled with endearing and eccentric characters' Amitav Ghosh 'It is utterly persuasive and deeply affecting: stylistically adventurous it is never self-indulgent although suffused with pain it shows no trace of self-pity. In Em and the Big Hoom, the son begins to unravel the story of his parents: the mother he loves and hates in the same moment and the unusual man who courted, married and protected her - as much from herself as from the world. Her husband - to whom she was once 'Buttercup' - and her two children must bear her 'microweathers', her swings from laugh-out-loud joy to dark malevolence. In a tiny flat in Bombay Imelda Mendes - Em to her children - holds her family in thrall with her flamboyance, her manic affection and her cruel candour. She was Em, and our father, sometimes, was the Big Hoom. There may have been a time when we called her something ordinary like Mummy, or Ma, but I don't remember. ![]() Brilliantly comic and almost unbearably moving, Jerry Pinto's Em and the Big Hoom is one of the most powerful and original fiction debuts of recent years. ![]()
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