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Original prin / Randy Boyagoda.
"Prin is a forty-year-old English professor who lives in Toronto. Following a cancer diagnosis, he resolves to be a better husband, father, and Catholic. He has a chance to do so when he learns that his university is going to shut down unless it comes up with a new purpose. He's asked to figure this out in the company of a Chinese real estate magnate and his flirty ex-girlfriend while also dealing with the demands of having four small children, a skeptical wife, and deranged, recently divorced parents. In the middle of a business meeting he has a mystical religious experience that compels him to go to the Middle East--with his ex-girlfriend--where he encounters God, temptation, and a gun-toting young Muslim man who also wants to do something big for his faith. A novel about a deeply Catholic Sri Lankan English professor, Original Prin is a strangely funny book sure to touch, vex, and amuse."-- Provided by publisher.
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- Booklist Reviews : Booklist Reviews 2019 April #2
*Starred Review* Canadian writer Boyagoda's ambitious new novel takes on academia, religion, politics, terrorism, international business, and immigrant identity as he tells the story of Prin, an English professor in a Catholic university in Toronto. Boyagoda gives us much to laugh at as he skewers holy cows, even as Prin deals with a diagnosis of early-stage pancreatic cancer. Prin struggles with the decision to travel to Dragomans, a fictional Middle Eastern country, to help with his employer's financial situation, revealing his shaky spirituality. His Sri Lankan immigrant parents, wife Molly, four daughters, and ex-girlfriend Wende are among the many people who populate his world and add layers and texture to the story. Prin, however, remains front and center as Boyagoda delivers a winning combination of academic satire and sociopolitical commentary that leaves readers facing grim reality and acknowledging the irrationality of it all. Globally aware and witty, this is the opening title in a projected trilogy and a tale that offers a fascinating new perspective on journeys of faith and contemporary intellectual pursuits. Copyright 2019 Booklist Reviews. - Kirkus Reviews : Kirkus Reviews 2019 March #1
Canadian academic and novelist Boyagoda (Richard John Neuhaus: A Life in the Public Square, 2015, etc.) skewers the corporatized university and modern-world politics alike in this delicious satire. Princely St. John Umbiligoda teaches English at a college once called Holy Family College until the faculty "expressed concern that the school was becoming increasingly irrelevant and too Catholic-seeming," whereupon it became the University of the Family Universal, or UFU. (Say the initials aloud.) That didn't help the fiscal situation, and the school is now teetering on bankruptcy. That's just the beginning of Prin's troubles. He's not particularly happily married, he's not well-paid, his work as a specialist in "marine life in the Canadian literary landscape" isn't setting the world on fire, and though only 40 he's battling prostate cancer. When a Chinese developer called The Nephew comes along with a plan to bail out the school, it's to make himself a fortune by leveraging the resources of a faraway Middle Eastern nation called Dragomans: UFU will become a retirement home for the well-to-do, and its Dragomans branch will train students to become caretakers with "diplomasâ¦in Eldercare Studies," as Prin's girlfriend, who's in on the deal, reveals, with the students then coming to Toronto "for internships at the condominium The Nephew is going to build on your campus." Teaching The English Patient far from home has its attractions, and so does that erstwhile girlfriend, but politics complicates the pictureâpolitics academic and worldly, and economics, and sex, and culture clashes, and good old-fashioned terrorism. Boyagoda's novel careens to an untidy, violent end with plenty of unresolved questions, which makes it a good thing that it's supposed to be the first installment of a trilogy. Messy though it may be, it's a lot of funâand you can't help but read on when opening a book that begins, "Eight months before he became a suicide b omber, Prin went to the zoo with his family." A lively complement to Kingsley Amis' Lucky Jim, Malcolm Bradbury's The History Man, Michael Chabon's Wonder Boys, and other academic sendups. Copyright Kirkus 2019 Kirkus/BPI Communications. All rights reserved.
