A thriller set in modern-day London. Anisa, a Pakistani immigrant from a wealthy family, dreams of translating great works of literature, but is stuckA thriller set in modern-day London. Anisa, a Pakistani immigrant from a wealthy family, dreams of translating great works of literature, but is stuck doing the subtitles on Bollywood movies. Her white boyfriend Adam speaks eight languages fluently, perfectly, like he was born to them. At first Anisa is only jealous, but then she learns that Adam is hiding a connection to the Centre, a mysterious organization that promises to teach anyone any language in only two weeks – for a price. And, well, who wouldn't be tempted? But visiting the Centre is only the beginning of Anisa's uncovering a whole host of secrets, as she meets and grows close to the Indian woman of her own age who runs the place; she and Anisa fall instantly into a close friendship which reveals some of Anisa's own missing pieces.
Anisa is a fabulous character – sympathetic and self-centered, unreliable and occasionally awful, trying her best but so often (like most of us) just justifying her own lack of action. The writing is fantastic, compelling and funny and sad and precise. Right from the first page, I had trouble putting it down.
The mystery of how the Centre does what it does is obvious from fairly early on, but I didn't feel like that was a problem. The drive of The Centre isn't so much about answering the question of "how?" but that of "what now?" Knowledge (of a language or of anything else) is power, but access to power is complicated by race, gender, sexuality, class, age, and so many other factors, all of which come into play. Anisa – and the other characters, and readers ourselves – want to remake the world for the better, but can she do so by using the tools of the powerful? Or would the act of using their tools change her into just another copy of them? The Centre doesn't answer these questions (and to be fair, how on earth could a single novel do so?), but the way it raises them and the dilemma it poses to Anisa is just so good.
Hugely recommended, and I can't wait for Siddiqi's next book....more
Absolutely excellent novel about a middle-aged lady pirate, called back to the sea for one last heist. Amina has been retired for ten years – which, nAbsolutely excellent novel about a middle-aged lady pirate, called back to the sea for one last heist. Amina has been retired for ten years – which, not so coincidentally, is the age of her beloved daughter. Amina is a devoted mother, but she can't deny that she longs for more adventures, to be back on her ship, to leave her name in the history books. So when opportunity comes knocking, it's perhaps a little too easy for Amina to agree to take the job. First, of course, she has to get her old team back together: there's Amina herself, a tough-as-nails captain who's trying to make up for past sins. Her first mate, Tinbu, is loyal and hard-working with a weakness for pretty men and stupid cats. Dalila is an expert in poisons, knock-gases, and chemical explosions, a mysterious woman with a tragic past. Majed, the navigator, older than the rest, staid and religious but with an endless appetite for exploring. The story is set in a very well-researched, historically accurate Indian Ocean of the 1100s or 1200s – well, accurate except for the fact that demons, chaos spirits, and sea monsters are all real and ready to cause problems.
This reminded me a lot of Indiana Jones – without the colonialism and stealing religious artifacts, of course. But that sense of just having fun with historical legends, of rollicking action scenes and bantering characters and solving magic puzzles in an otherwise un-supernatural world: all of that felt very similar. Except updated for the 2020s; Chakraborty includes characters from every country and culture of the region, gay characters, and a really engaging non-binary character.
This is the first book in a planned trilogy, but you could read it as a stand-alone. It wraps up all the threads neatly at the end, though there's an obvious sequel hook for future adventures. There's nothing particularly deep here, but it's all just So Much Fun....more
Ugh, this book. Such a promising concept! South Asian Londoner sees visions of the Hindu gods, uses this to solve magical crimes.
Unfortunately the boUgh, this book. Such a promising concept! South Asian Londoner sees visions of the Hindu gods, uses this to solve magical crimes.
Unfortunately the book itself is boring and extremely male-gazey. For example, not even ten pages in the main character has sex with a woman he just met on a plane, after a brief, very stupid conversation about her tattoos and intention of going on a ~spiritual journey~ to India. (This is not critiqued. A white woman with a Kali tattoo is apparently just a chill, kinky sex partner.) The vibe of female characters being around only to throw themselves at the main character continues throughout the whole book, with one of the main women being basically an insane nymphomaniac. Every female character feels like she was imported from a trashy pulp novel of the 1950s, not a book published in 2016.
The conceit of Ravi seeing gods – the main reason I read this – also didn't work for me. It was never clear if they were hallucinations or actual visions, and while I'm all for books leaving some things ambiguous, but in this case I just felt confused and unengaged.
An absolutely fantastic f/f fantasy novel, set in a world inspired by historical India (I'd say it's a mostly Maurya empire-ish, but also it's a fantaAn absolutely fantastic f/f fantasy novel, set in a world inspired by historical India (I'd say it's a mostly Maurya empire-ish, but also it's a fantasy and trying to pin it to an exact historical period is like trying to determine if Lord of the Rings is more Anglo-Saxon or more Norse) – in other words, basically everything I want out of a book.
Malini is the imprisoned sister of the emperor, exiled for refusing to burn herself to grant him power and with a high likelihood of being quietly disposed of now that she's been put away and is being slowly forgotten by the court. Priya is the servant assigned to care for Malini, who has an enormous secret of her own – a living reminder of the cost of all empires – which should make her Malini's enemy, but the two find themselves too compelled by one another to want to entirely destroy the other. We've got morally gray choices, complicated court politics, a theme of how to survive oppression (do you work within the system to save who you can, or do you burn it all down?), rebels, infighting, magical plagues, longing, childhood trauma, lesbians... all the good stuff!
The Jasmine Throne is the first in a trilogy, and I cannot wait to read the rest. I read this as an ARC via NetGalley....more
The fifth book in the Vish Puri series, murder mysteries set in Delhi. This one, though set in 2016, mostly concerns a murder that took place in 1984 The fifth book in the Vish Puri series, murder mysteries set in Delhi. This one, though set in 2016, mostly concerns a murder that took place in 1984 during the anti-Sikh riots that followed the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. Puri's own father was a police detective at the time, and investigated the death of Riya Kaur, suspecting that she was actually murdered by her husband, who used the riots to cover up his own crime. Unfortunately Puri's father was never able to prove anything, and the case haunted him until his death. Now Puri's mother ("Mummy-ji") believes she has found the proof – in the form of recovered memories from a woman who claims to be Kaur's reincarnation. Puri's skepticism about the supernatural runs up against the impossibly accurate information Kaur's supposed reincarnation is able to provide.
Meanwhile, the government of India releases a surprise announcement that all paper money must be exchanged at banks for new paper money within the next 48 hours, or else it will become worthless. It's part of a plan to reduce the black market, but Puri finds himself both with a buttload of cash to exchange and no time to do so, and clues to a suspected money launderer.
Despite the seriousness of both cases, the Vish Puri books are always funny, cozy, and full of lots of food porn – especially street food. They're light mysteries, overall; a subplot concerns a bride who wants to know why her groom is such a loud snorer, for example. I didn't enjoy this one quite as much as I've enjoyed the previous books, unfortunately, but it's still a fun series that does a wonderful job at capturing the feel of Delhi.
(Also, I read this book while on a trip to India earlier this year, and it finally cleared up my confusion at why everyone refused to take my old cash!) I read this as an ARC via NetGalley....more
A modern-day take on Don Quixote (Quichotte is the spelling of the eponymous hero's name in the French operatic version of the story). This time arounA modern-day take on Don Quixote (Quichotte is the spelling of the eponymous hero's name in the French operatic version of the story). This time around, Quichotte is an elderly Indian man now living in the United States, making his living as a traveling salesman for his cousin's (who owns a massive drug company) new opioid painkillers. As Quichotte drives from small town to small town, staying alone in rundown motels, he becomes obsessed with TV – all types of TV, from reality shows to the news to infomercials to reruns of black-and-white movies to sitcoms – and in particular with Salma R, former Bollywood star turned US TV star turned talk show host, who has an Oprah-like level of popularity and significance. Quichotte sets out to win her heart by a journey both literal (a road trip from Nowhere, Out West to NYC) and metaphysical (going through the mystical "Seven Valleys of Love", which involves giving up belief and knowledge and desire and all material belongings, before finally uniting with the beloved). Along the way he accidentally summons into existence a teen boy named Sancho, who may be Quichotte and Salma's son from the future or may merely be a figment of Quichotte's imagination.
Quichotte's is not the only story going on in this novel, however. Salma gets her own chapters, revealing her troubled childhood and addiction to the very drugs Quichotte sold, as well as her reaction to the mysterious stalker letters Quichotte keeps sending her. Sancho struggles to figure out who he is and how he can become a "real boy", complete with assistance from a talking cricket and the blue fairy. Quichotte's cousin, the owner of the multimillion drug company, deals with the American-Indian community while seeking to avoid arrest for bribing doctors to overprescribe his drugs. And outside of all of this, we have Brother, who is the author of the novel Quichotte, yes, the very one you're reading. Brother's "real" life has prominent parallels to Quichotte's: they both grew up in the same neighborhood of Bombay and have mixed feelings about their move from India to the US; they both have long-estranged sisters; they both have troubled relationships with their sons.
There is a lot of stuff going on in this novel, in case you haven't guessed. And I haven't even mentioned the Elon Musk surrogate (here named Evel Cent and obsessed with travel between dimensions rather than spaceflight), the thread about increasing American racism, the secret military cabal of computer hackers, the brief but odd flight of fantasy about Trump voters turning into woolly mammoths, cheesy spy thrillers, and, oh yeah, the literal end of the universe. With so much stuff, inevitably some of it doesn't work (I was particularly annoyed by a rant about 'cancel culture' late in the book), but a surprising amount of it does, and hangs together in unexpected ways.
Overall, it's a rolicking, bouncing satire that lingers less and seems to have less to say than many of Rushdie's books. There's not much of a message below all the dazzling twists and turns ("the opioid crisis is bad", I guess, is the main takeaway? Not a particularly deep conclusion, that). Which is fine! Not every novel has to Explain the Condition of the World Today. But it's oddly the closest I've ever seen Rushdie come to writing a Beach Read – though still with all the allusions and stylistic flourishes that are typical Rushdie.
My main complaint is that, despite the basic premise of "Don Quixote but with American TV", Quichotte does not actually seem to be all that influenced by TV. Sure, we're told frequently enough that he watches too much TV, but nothing about his speaking style (described as old fashioned, mannerly, and charming), his behavior (gentle, slow, determined), his approach to life (philosophical, forgetful), or really anything else about him resembles modern TV in the slightest. In fact, the main influences on Quichotte are medieval Persian poetry (the source of the Seven Valleys of Love, which together form the main structure of the novel) and two old-school sci-fi short stories: one the well-known The Nine Billion Names of God by Arthur C. Clarke (with its famous final line, "Overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out") and the other the much more obscure Pictures Don't Lie by Katherine MacLean. All three of these are repeatedly referenced by characters throughout the book, but don't have any connection to Quichotte's supposed diet of nonstop TV. I definitely got the vibe that Rushdie had the idea of updating Quixote from chivalric romances to their modern mental-junk-food equivalent, but doesn't actually watch enough trash TV himself to describe or reference or include it in any detailed way. Which does make me wonder why he decided to write a book about it, but oh well.
Quichotte is a lot of unexpected fun, but I wouldn't count on it becoming Rushdie's defining work.
A novel set in modern India by the author of The God of Small Things. I have been waiting for Roy to return to writing fiction for nearly twenty yearsA novel set in modern India by the author of The God of Small Things. I have been waiting for Roy to return to writing fiction for nearly twenty years... though I don't like to complain when she's been spending her time on vitally important journalism that seeks to point out injustices and protect minorities. The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is exactly the novel you might expect from a writer with that background.
Our main character – or so, at least, it appears at first – is Anjum, a hijra (more or less a transwoman, although there are some cultural differences that make it not quite the same identity as in the West) in Shahjahanabad, the old, mostly-Muslim neighborhood of Delhi. The first half of The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is the small story of Anjum's life – her singing lessons as a child, her eventual joining of a group of other hijras, her recognition as a famous activist icon only to be undermined in later decades by younger and yet more progressive hijras, her adoption of an abandoned child, her near-death experience in the 2002 Gujarat riots, her emotional breakdown afterward that leads to her losing her adopted daughter to another mother, and her eventual decision to start living in a graveyard, unable to deal with life or the world. As the years and decades pass, though, Anjum slowly recovers, and starts to claim the land within the mostly-disused graveyard, eventually erecting a guesthouse that collects other outcasts: a blind imam, retired hijras, a Dalit (the group that was formerly called "untouchables") man who's pretending to be a Muslim (slightly less socially rejected) and has renamed himself Saddam Hussein, a newborn baby found on the sidewalk, and, eventually, Tilo, whose story forms the second half of the novel.
Tilo's story is far more structurally experimental than Anjum's. It frequently skips around in time and place, switches narrators, diverts at one point into a long, nearly nonfictional satire of children's fiction, and takes a hundred pages or so just to explain what happened to Tilo. It's hard to even call it her story, since the second half of The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is even less about her than the three men who were her college friends and who are all obsessively in love with her: Musa, who grows up to become a Kashmiri freedom fighter; Biplab Dasgupta, who becomes a government agent also in Kashmir, organizing the torture, murders, and propaganda Musa fights against; and Naga, who starts out as a human rights activist, transitions into being a leftist journalist, and is slowly corrupted by Dasgupta into being a government mouthpiece. Tilo herself is a bit of a manic pixie dream girl, left traumatized by what she's witnessed and seemingly passive to the will of whoever she's around. But even more than any of them, it's a novel about Kashmir and all of its people: toddlers shot at funerals, movie theaters remade into "interrogation" centers, the intellectually disabled mistaken for militant commanders and beaten to death, 4am awakenings, martyr graveyards, poisoned gifts.
The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is about a group of outcasts who find family and, well, utmost happiness by abandoning the real world and making their own. But because of that theme it is, ultimately, also a story about the world that cast them out in the first place. In other words, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is a novel that is all about modern Indian politics, and it assumes that the reader is already familiar with the issues. I mentioned above the 2002 Gujarat riots and Kashmiri freedom movement, but The Ministry of Utmost Happiness also covers Anna Hazare's 2001 anti-corruption protests, Adivasis and the Naxalite insurgency, cow vigilante killings, the Bhopal chemical disaster, Narendra Modi's rise to power, and Hindutva. If you don't know what any of those are, Roy's not going to explain it to you. As an example of what I mean by that, Modi (India's current prime minister) is never actually referred to by name. It's obviously him, but Roy always calls him Gujarat ka Lalla, or Gujarat's Beloved. If you can't recognize him by description alone, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is not particularly interested in speaking to you. Which I don't mean as a criticism; plenty of writers have a specific audience and aren't interested in doing 101 for outsiders. But I think it does explain a lot of the negative reactions that I've seen to this book. It's pretty incomprehensible if you don't follow Indian politics. (And if you do, I have to admit that it's a little bit "Greatest Hits of Indian Leftists", as though Roy had to cram every single issue that she's ever been concerned with into one novel.)
I wish it leaned a little heavier on the characters and their personal emotions and a little lighter on the political lessons, but I enjoyed The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. It doesn't remotely compare to The God of Small Things in lyricism or tragic power, but that's okay. Not every book has to be world-changing. The Ministry of Utmost Happiness might be smaller and more likely to be forgotten, but it's a good story for here and now. ...more
A mystery novel set in 1837 India, starring William Avery (young army officer, annoyingly full of British arrogance and sneers at 'native culture' - tA mystery novel set in 1837 India, starring William Avery (young army officer, annoyingly full of British arrogance and sneers at 'native culture' - though he learns better by the end of the book) and Jeremiah Blake (British ex-spy who's 'gone native' and has to be blackmailed into doing any further work for the East India Company) team up to find the famous writer Xavier Mountstuart, who's gone missing somewhere in the countryside. The search leads them to the Thuggee Cult - a network of Kali worshipers who rob travelers before sacrificing them to their dark goddess. It may not surprise you to learn that Avery and Blake quickly uncover proof that the previous sentence is complete nonsense. Along the way, this mismatched couple learns to trust one another.
The historical research is very well done, and I quite liked Carter's take on the issue of Thugs. There was a wide variety of characters, all of them engaging and charming (though my very favorite was the cameo appearance of Fanny Parkes, real travel writer), and the mystery had several wonderful action set-pieces, evil villains, and a very satisfactory conclusion.
And yet. The Strangler Vine is a fine book, but simply not a great one. In the wide genres of historical mystery (in which I have read many, many masterpieces) and South Asian fiction (in which I have also read many, many masterpieces), The Strangler Vine just doesn't stand out from the crowd. I don't not recommend it! And yet, for myself, I don't think I'll be bothering to read the sequels. ...more
A novel set in Bhopal, India, mostly in the 1980s, but with significant flashbacks to the 50s, 60s, and 70s. Zamir Ahmad Khan is an excessively averagA novel set in Bhopal, India, mostly in the 1980s, but with significant flashbacks to the 50s, 60s, and 70s. Zamir Ahmad Khan is an excessively average guy: middle-aged, middle class, married to a wife he seems to have no particular feelings for, father of two young children whom he spends little time with, and not as close to his friends as he used to be. He had a job selling antique furniture, but lost it due to his strategy of simply not showing up for months on end. Zamir believes he has a mysterious disease that has caused all of these problems, but multiple doctors haven't been able to diagnose anything, and indeed he seems to have no symptoms beyond vague feelings of alienation and guilt. Zamir is the missing man of the title, but he's not missing in any literal sense; instead, he's missing from his own life, missing any idea of who he is or what he's meant to be doing.
There's no real plot to the novel. Zamir watches his life slowly disintegrate while reminiscing about people or places he once knew in short, disintegrated vignettes that make up the majority of the page count. This is all extremely slow and extremely unengaging; I really had to struggle even to finish the book. My main problem wasn't just boredom, though. Zamir is a complete asshole of a protagonist. Despite all his moping and claims of ill use, he continually commits petty crimes against others: deliberately running up debts at small shops with no intention to pay, spreading negative rumors about people, starting fights, committing adultery. And for all his whining and avowed guilt, he never changes or does anything to correct these problems. He's a realistic enough person, I suppose, but I absolutely do not want to spend two hundred pages with him. The afterword describes this as "subversive and sardonic", but if that was the intention, it absolutely did not come through in the writing. Though I don't know if that's the fault of the original author or the translators.
Overall a draggy book with an irritating protagonist. There are a million novels about middle class India that are so, so much better than this.