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From Publishers Weekly
At once clever and superficial, Tyrewala's debut novel presents 50 collaborative narratives set in Mumbai. Most of the stories are brief first-person accounts of makeshift perseverance against India's postcolonial problems: Hindu hostility toward Muslim minorities, mass poverty, pollution, corruption and the uneasy accommodation of global capitalism. But while many people Tyrewala channels—including an abortionist's father, an impotent adolescent and an unwitting polygamist—are immediately interesting, few are effectively realized, as Tyrewala's hero is the city itself, and he constructs this pulsing protagonist with interconnected vignettes featuring its citizens. For instance, an episode from the perspective of a woman seeking police help leads into another from the perspective of the petitioned officer, which leads to another from the perspective of a jaded journalist. The underlying concept is reminiscent of David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, but Tyrewala fumbles the delivery: he successfully pits the specter of old-money Mumbai against the new poor, but fails to vary his austere prose style from character to character ("I am an abortionist"; "Today is my sixteenth birthday"; "I want to become a lawyer"). The result is a laudable debut, but some readers will find that what each character thinks is less interesting than how they think. (Aug. 18)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
Tyrewala's unique, cutting-edge debut jumps staccato-style from one character to another, each tied to the next if only by the thinnest of threads. The characters include a Muslim abortionist whose mother was trampled in the hajj and whose father has disowned him; the father's boss; a Muslim who emigrates to the U.S. to escape Hindu persecution; a young Muslim refugee, now an orphan, who crowds with his pregnant girlfriend and great-aunt into "the best slum refined refugees could find"; a polio victim; and a chicken butcher who ponders the morality of his profession. Each struggles with harsh realities with no earthly rewards in sight. At the center of the author's melange of downtrodden characters is Bombay itself--which he brings vividly to life, from the abortionist's office to the chicken market and from the gangster's hideout in a rat-infested slum to the dance bars where swinging singles migrate. This is what the reader will remember, this furtive glimpse of what lies just beneath the surface of this teeming metropolis. Deborah Donovan
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
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