Playing the Game by Ian Buruma

Playing the Game by Ian Buruma

Neville Cardus suspected that K.S. Ranjitsinhji, the legendary Indian prince who played cricket for Sussex and MCC at the turn of the century, was 'perhaps a dream, all dreamed on some midsummer's night long ago'. Studded with imagined events fashioned from known facts, Playing the Game is Ian Buruma's absorbing and richly entertaining re-invention of Ranji's life - a novel imagining itself a biography. It reveals a man, confused and desperate to find an identity for himself - an adopted English gentleman, an adopted Indian prince - sometimes both, in the end, probably neither. He died in 1933, his balding pet parrot at his side. Playing the Game is about Englishness, cultural identity, impersonation and pretending, a book about real people, imagined people, and those who don't know the difference. Leisurely, philosophical, exotic, crammed with wickedly entertaining cameos (W. G. Grace, Gandhi, Disraeli, Wilde), littered with heroic cricketing feats (one of them in drag), grand balls in the Indian Desert, and even an audience with Hitler, Playing the Game is about Playing Games, about dandyism, a Flaubert's Parrot of a novel that is a brilliant dandy joke in itself.

Ian Buruma's previous books include A Japanese Mirror, a study of heroes and villains in Japanese culture, and God's Dust, a journey through Asia, described by Susan Sontag as 'shrewd, bold... necessary reading.' This is his first novel.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780224027588
ISBN 10	0224027581
Title	Playing the Game
Author	Ian Buruma
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	Vintage Publishing
Year published	1991-04-11
Number of pages	234
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
Note	Unavailable