Books for Sagittarius Season

Professor Chandra Follows His Bliss by Rajeev Balasabramanyam

P.R. Chandrasekhar, the celebrated professor of economics at Cambridge, is at a turning point. 

He has sacrificed his family for his career, but his conservative brand of economics is no longer in fashion, and yet again he has lost the Nobel Prize to a rival. His wife has left him for a free-spirited West Coast psychiatrist and relocated to Boulder, Colorado. His son, a capitalist guru with a cult following, mocks his father’s life work; his middle daughter, the apple of his eye, has become a Marxist and refuses to speak to him; and his youngest daughter is struggling through her teenage years with the help of psychedelic drugs. And then, the final indignity: He is hit by a bicycle and forced to confront his mortality. 

Professor Chandra’s American doctor instructs him to change his workaholic ways and “follow his bliss”–and so he does, right to the coast of California, and into the heart of his dysfunctional family. Witty, charming, and all too human, Professor Chandra’s path to enlightenment will enchant and uplift readers from all walks of life

“Chandra [is] brilliant, cutting, hilarious, and clueless … With humor and emotional agility, Balasubramanyam writes a feel-good story that leaves room for feeling bad”.

Booklist

Lake Success by Gary Shteyngart

When his dream of the perfect marriage, the perfect son, and the perfect life implodes, a Wall Street millionaire takes a cross-country bus trip in search of his college sweetheart and ideals of youth. 

Myopic, narcissistic, hilariously self-deluded, and divorced from the real world as most of us know it, hedge fund manager Barry Cohen oversees $2.4 billion in assets. Deeply stressed by an SEC investigation and by his three-year-old son’s diagnosis of autism, he flees New York on a Greyhound bus in search of a simpler, more romantic life with his old college sweetheart, whom he hasn’t seen or spoken to in years. 

Meanwhile, reeling from the fight that caused Barry’s departure, his super-smart wife Seema–a driven first-generation American who craved a picture-perfect life, with all the accouterments of a huge bank account–has her own demons to face. 

How these two imperfect characters navigate the Shteyngartian chaos of their own making is the heart of this biting, brilliant, emotionally resonant novel very much of our times.

“Adjust your expectations when you pick up Gary Shteyngart’s Lake Success. His new book is not insanely funny nor hilariously absurd. It’s better than that”.

Ron Charles, The Washington Post

Mercury Pictures Presents by Anthony Marra

When we first meet Maria Lagana, she’s rewriting scripts at Mercury Pictures, a failing Hollywood studio known for its schlock. Maria’s job is to re-craft dialogue and action to circumvent the censors, a skill she’s mysteriously adept at. 

Born in Italy, as a teenager, Maria witnessed Mussolini’s censors arrest her father, an event that will destroy her family and burden Maria with questions of guilt and responsibility she will carry with her throughout this wondrous, far-reaching novel. Like many before her, Maria has come to Hollywood to outrun her past. Despite its cheap production values and factory approach to making movies, Mercury Pictures is a nexus of refugees and emigres, each struggling to reinvent themselves in the land of celluloid. 

There’s Artie, the studio boss, a man of many toupees who barely escaped the pogroms of Eastern Europe; there’s Anna, a set designer, who ran afoul of Hitler; and there’s Eddie Lu, a struggling actor and Maria’s boyfriend, who despite being born in Los Angeles encounters the worst of America’s xenophobia. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, everything changes for Maria and her world, forcing her to come to terms with her father’s fate–and her own.

“Amid all the action and plot twists, it’s also a serious examination of immigration and xenophobia, identity and impersonation, and art, propaganda and censorship … Marra glides effortlessly between a number of characters and their pasts, presents and futures, all of which are complicated by World War II”.

Alice Carey, BookPage