A Blue Hand
A Blue Hand: The Beats in India Deborah Baker,
Publisher: Penguin Press HC, The
ISBN: 1594201587
DDC: 811.54
Edition: Hardcover; 2008-04-10
Summary:
A literary exploration of the Beats' encounter with India in the
1960s, a journey that inspired and influenced generations of
Americans and Indians alike In 1961, Allen Ginsberg left New York by
boat for Bombay, India. He brought with him his troubled lover, Peter
Orlovsky, and a plan to meet up with poets Gary Snyder and Joanne
Kyger. He left behind not only fellow Beats Jack Kerouac, Gregory
Corso, and William Burroughs, but also the relentless notoriety that
followed his publication of Howl, the epic work that branded him the
voice of a generation. Drawing from extensive research in India,
undiscovered letters, journals, and memoirs, acclaimed biographer
Deborah Baker has woven a many layered literary mystery out of
Ginsberg's odyssey. A Blue Hand follows him and his companions as
they travel from the ashrams of the Himalayan foothills to Delhi
opium dens and the burning pyres of Benares. They encounter an India
of charlatans and saints, a country of spectacular beauty and
spiritual promise and of devastating poverty and political unease. In
Calcutta, Ginsberg discovers a circle of hungry young writers whose
outrageousness and genius are uncannily reminiscent of his own past.
Finally, Ginsberg searches for Hope Savage, the mysterious and
beautiful girl whose path, before she disappeared, had crossed his
own in Greenwich Village, San Francisco, and Paris. In their
restless, comic and oftimes tortured search for meaning, the Beats
looked to India for answers while India looked to the West. A Blue
Hand is the story of their search for God, for love, and for peace in
the shadow of the atomic bomb. It is also a story of India-its gods
and its poets, its politics and its place in the American
imagination.
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