A Pack Of Lies

By Urmilla Deshpande

No Synopsis Available.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 9380032838
• ISBN13: 9789380032832
• Release Date: October 2009
• Publisher: Westland
• Length: 292 Pages
• Weight: 0.63 lbs.
• Dimensions: 7.9" x 0.8" x 5.1"

Customer Reviews

A tasty little treat that is hard to put down

Join Ginny on her roller coaster of a journey in frantic search for love, for her mother, for the meaning of home, and ultimately for herself. I devoured this lushly descriptive, engaging tale in a couple of delicious gulps. Slurp. I was drawn in by the story, the graphic language, but most of all by the motley of offbeat characters. Teenage, Lolitaesque Ginny is left to tough it out on the mean streets of Mumbai, circa 1980, when she is abandoned by her 'deadbeat' mother whose love and approval she desperately craves. She takes on the world with an insatiable hunger for food, men, sex and love; a tough exterior, and insightful observations about the people and situations she encounters. It evokes a slice of Mumbai life complete with its squalor, street dogs, monsoons, local trains, beef chili fry and chili laced omelets - richly bringing it's tastes and smells to life. Aah the food, made me hungry. Ginny's charm and sense of optimism shines through, despite her gritty, tough as nails, wanton exterior; adding a dimension of softness to this not so feel good novel. I found parallels between this book and "White Oleander". Soundtrack for this book? How about "I will Survive" meets "I still haven't found what I'm looking for".

Truth? Lies!

A Pack of Lies might be truths presented as lies or lies presented at truths - it really doesn't matter. Everything in this book touches you in some way - there are moments and people in here that are easy to relate to. It is hard to imagine that this is not a memoir of sorts - the words and situations and characters seem so real - there are no 'good guys' or 'bad guys'. Even the protagonist, Ginny, seems to make the best of her situations and do what needs to be done to survive - and she often does this by following her nose or her sexuality, which creates visualizations and aromatizations that make you wish this were also a scratch-and-smell book. Urmilla writes with a mesmerizing stream-of-consciousness style that makes it hard to put the book down. I will admit that there are parts when you want it to move faster - but this is not because the content is boring, you just want to know what happens to Ginny next... and then when it's over, you wish you had more! I loved reading this book - it made me cry and laugh till snot ran out my nose. yes, the author is my sister, but a) that makes me more critical and b) I'm jealous! She's written a way good book which is definitely a great story about life and love and people. Read it!

Not your mother's Indian novel

This book surprised me and in a good way. First off, the narrator is an Indian woman named Virginia, after Virginia Woolf. She earns her namesake, writing in a stream of consciousness that circles, advances and retreats--yet always moves forward. At times, I felt as though the narrator was whispering in my ear; the book has that confessional quality. The images are quite powerful: bathing suits and bald heads will never be the same.

lies and truths ...

(Full disclosure: this author is a friend of mine.) I found this memoiristic novel written in the form that memory takes -- sometimes disjointed, highly associative -- to be very moving. It was a glimpse into a world that was foreign to me and into a psyche wholly its own. The result is a narrative that aches and swells. A tale of resilience.

The Truth of the Matter

This novel masquerading as memoir titled as deceit will remind you why writers write and readers read. Great novels are about the need to tell and listen to stories. Urmilla Desphande's voice, both familiar and unique, will make you feel as if you are chatting with a friend you've missed for decades and who now has tales to tell on which your very happiness may depend. The book chronicles the life of an Indian woman named Ginny. Her mother, a renowned author, named her after Virginia Wolf. But this mother seems to have forgotten she ever became one. Like her namesake, Ginny threatens to drown. Good thing her mother taught her how to swim, literally. Ginny learned to swim metaphorically on her own. Her mother sends her to school each day with a trifling package of cookies that she eats alone under a tree. When a teacher calls Ginny in to eat a proper school lunch one day, Ginny takes the revelation much as she takes others in her life: with the aplomb of a sinner for whom redemption is always possible but seems unlikely. Through the years, Ginny grows like roots in dry soil, thrusting with a desperate calm toward remnants of past rains. These Ginny finds--or thinks she does--in the bed and lens of a lecherous photographer who makes her a successful model but who belittles her so thoroughly she fears to leave him. Her stepfather takes her to his bed, to which Ginny goes with an uncanny awareness of what is happening but with a helplessness befitting her age that reproduces the unhappiness she seeks to escape. And after she finds a kindred spirit in a fellow model, who becomes her inscrutable older sister, the sister disappears. Boyfriends come and go: a live-in companion in an apartment riddled with termites, an enigmatic, hash-selling renegade, and a consular officer who tells Ginny's mother about her step-father's "attentions." These boys--they are hardly men--all leave in Ginny traces of a painfully accumulating longing that will haunt her into adulthood and that lands her, following her mother's shock at Ginny's "lies" about her step-father's liaison with her, in the chair of an angelic psychiatrist named Gabriel, who finally listens. The same longing eventually separates her from the man she follows to the United States. Most movingly, she finds herself on the lap of paraplegic painter who loves her for the work of art she is, who tells her so, and whose faith in her flowers later into an affirmation beyond the neglect so many have shown her. But it is Ginny's younger sister, Simi, who is the anchor of her life. Or rather, it is Ginny who anchors hers. It is Ginny who finds a way back home for the two of them from a marshy lake to which their mother has dragged them on a whim to see two flamingos, as misplaced as the girls. Instead of their mother, Ginny shows up at Simi's school on the day she suffers a concussion after falling from the jungle gym. And it is Ginny who accompanies Simi to the hospital where their mother lays dying fro