Джит Тайил4.0 Jeet Thayil’s luminous debut novel completely subverts and challenges the literary traditions for which the Indian novel is celebrated. This is a book about drugs, sex, death, perversion, addiction, love, and god, and has more in common in its subject matter with the work of William S. Burroughs or Baudelaire than with the subcontinent’s familiar literary lights. Above all, it is a fantastical portrait of a beautiful and damned generation in a nation about to sell its soul. Written in Thayil’s poetic and affecting prose, Narcopolis charts the evolution of a great and broken metropolis.
Narcopolis opens in Bombay in the late 1970s, as its narrator first arrives from New York to find himself entranced with the city’s underworld, in particular an opium den and attached brothel. A cast of unforgettably degenerate and magnetic characters works and patronizes the venue, including Dimple, the eunuch who makes pipes in the den; Rumi, the salaryman and husband whose addiction is violence; Newton Xavier, the celebrated painter who both rejects and craves adulation; Mr. Lee, the Chinese refugee and businessman; and a cast of poets, prostitutes, pimps, and gangsters.
Decades pass to reveal a changing Bombay, where opium has given way to heroin from Pakistan and the city’s underbelly has become ever rawer. Those in their circle still use sex for their primary release and recreation, but the violence of the city on the nod and its purveyors have moved from the fringes to the center of their lives. Yet Dimple, despite the bleakness of her surroundings, continues to search for beauty—at the movies, in pulp magazines, at church, and in a new burka-wearing identity.
After a long absence, the narrator returns in 2004 to find a very different Bombay. Those he knew are almost all gone, but the passion he feels for them and for the city is revealed.
Амитав Гош4.2 В сентябре 1838 года в Индийском океане шхуна “Ибис”, перевозившая заключенных и наемных рабочих из Калькутты на Маврикий, попала в самый центр мощного шторма. Роман следует за судьбами людей, угодивших в бурю — не только природную, но и историческую. Некоторых из них шторм и судьба забросили в китайский Кантон, где сосредоточена торговля с иностранцами. Несмотря на усилия китайского императора остановить торговлю опиума, корабли европейцев, курсирующие между Индией и Китаем, по-прежнему доставляют зелье. Центральные фигуры во второй книге трилогии — богатый опиумный торговец-парс из Бомбея; бывший индийский раджа, ставший писарем в торговой миссии; юная француженка-сирота и пестрая компания, объединившаяся в погоне за романтикой и богатством. Каждый из них пытается справиться со своими потерями, а некоторые — и с обрушившейся на них свободой.
Джамиль Ахмад0.0 The boy known as Tor Baz - the black falcon - wanders the tribal landscape of Pakistan, Iran and Afghanistan. He meets men who fight under different flags, and women who risk everything if they break their society's code of honour. Where has he come from, and where will fate take him?
"Remarkable. Written in a style that has about it the reverberant clarity of fables, but their intention is realist, uncovering a largely neglected world, and their cumulative effect is deeply moving".
Sunday limes "Shocking. Its setting alone, in the cruel and punishing highlands, deserts and rocky altitudes where the borders of Pakistan. Afghanistan and Iran meet, is worth the price of admission. Here is a book, to my knowledge the first in fiction, that gives an insiders account of the hard-bitten lives of the scores of tribes, collectively known as the Pawindas, or foot-people. The result is mesmerizing".
The limes "Striking. One of the finest collections of short stories to come out of south Asia in decades. Rarely has a writer shown greater empathy for its people, or brought such wisdom and know ledge to writing about a terrain largely inaccessible. I he power and beauty of these stories are unparalleled in most fiction to come out of south".
Asia Guardian
Удай Пракаш0.0 A sweeper discovers a cache of black money and escapes to see the Taj Mahal with his underage mistress. An untouchable races to reclaim his life stolen by an upper-caste identity thief. A slum baby's head gets bigger and bigger as he gets smarter and smarter, while his family tries to find a cure. In The Walls of Delhi, gifted storyteller Uday Prakash tells three stinging and comic tales of living and surviving in today's globalized India. Prakash is one of India's most original and audacious writers, and the India that he presents in his fiction is much different from what one generally finds in English-language writing by South Asian writers. Prakash portrays the realities about caste and class, and there is a charming and compelling authenticity in his stories that is sometimes absent from other fiction about South Asia. This writing sits at the center of a modernist aesthetic, as well as being highly political without a bit of didacticism or other heavy-handedness. These stories are tremendously popular in India, having been translated into several Indian languages.
Нивен Говинден0.0 OBSERVER BOOKS OF THE YEAR 2012LONGLISTED FOR THE DSC PRIZE FOR SOUTH ASIAN LITERATUREAmal is driving his wife Claud from London to her parents’ country house. In the wake of Claud’s miscarriage, it is a journey that will push their relationship – once almost perfect – towards possible collapse.In this, his latest novel, Govinden casts a critical eye on a society in which, in spite of never-ending advances in social media communications, the young still find it difficult to communicate.A devastatingly passionate and real portrait of a marriage, ‘Black Bread White Beer’ keenly captures the abandon, selfishness, hazards and pleasures that come with giving your life to another.
Джерри Пинто0.0 In a one-bedroom-hall-kitchen in Mahim, Bombay, through the last decades of the twentieth century, lived four love-battered Mendeses: mother, father, son and daughter. Between Em, the mother, driven frequently to hospital after her failed suicide attempts, and The Big Hoom, the father, trying to hold things together as best he could, they tried to be a family.
Мушарраф Али Фаруки0.0 In an old ruined city, emptied of most of its inhabitants, Ustad Ramzi, a famous wrestler past his prime, and Gohar Jan, a well-known courtesan whose kotha once attracted the wealthy and the eminent, contemplate the former splendour of their lives and the ruthless currents of time and history that have swept them into oblivion.
Рупа Фаруки0.0 “I was once a journalist, a counterfeiter, an internet entrepreneur. I was once a son, a husband, a father. And now I’m a storyteller.” Meet Maqil - also known as Mike, Mehmet, Mikhail and Miguel - a chancer, charmer and charlatan. A criminally clever man who tells a good tale, trading on his charm and good looks, reinventing himself with a new identity and nationality in each successive country he makes his home, abandoning wives and children and careers in the process. He's a compulsive gambler - driven to lose at least as much as he gains, in games of chance, and in life. A damaged man in search of himself.
From the day he was delivered in Lahore, Pakistan, alongside his stillborn twin, he proved he was a born survivor. He has been a master of flying escapes, from Cairo to Paris, from London to Hong Kong, humbled by love, outliving his peers, and ending up old and alone in a budget hotel in Biarritz some eighty years later. His chequered history is catching up with him: his tracks have been uncovered and his latest wife, his children, his creditors and former business associates, all want to pin him down. But even at the end, Maqil just can't resist trying it on; he's still playing his game, and the game won't be over until it's been won.
Рахул Бхаттачария0.0 In flight from the tame familiarity of home in Bombay, a twenty-six-year-old cricket journalist chucks his job and arrives in Guyana, a forgotten colonial society of raw, mesmerizing beauty. Amid beautiful, decaying wooden houses in Georgetown, on coastal sugarcane plantations, and in the dark rainforest interior scavenged by diamond hunters, he grows absorbed with the fantastic possibilities of this new place where descendants of the enslaved and indentured have made a new world. Ultimately, to fulfill his purpose, he prepares to mount an adventure of his own. His journey takes him beyond Guyanese borders, and his companion will be the feisty, wild-haired Jan.
In this dazzling novel, propelled by a singularly forceful voice, Rahul Bhattacharya captures the heady adventures of travel, the overheated restlessness of youth, and the paradoxes of searching for life’s meaning in the escape from home.
Элис Альбиния0.0 Leela - alluring, taciturn, haunted - is moving back to Delhi from New York. She knows her return will unsettle precariously balanced lives. Twenty-two years ago her sister was seduced by Vyasa, a young university lecturer. Now an eminent Sanskrit scholar, Vyasa is preparing for the unlikely marriage of his son, Ash, to the child of a Hindu nationalist. Compounding Leela's disruptive presence, Ash's hedonistic twin sister Bharati arrives from London, reluctantly leaving her cosmopolitan university life to see Ash married. Ash, meanwhile, has fallen in love with his brother-in-law to be. Gleefully presiding over the drama is Ganesh - divine, elephant-headed scribe of India's great epic, the Mahabharata. The family patriarchs may think they have arranged the wedding for their own selfish ends, but according to Ganesh it is he who is directing events - in a bid to save Leela, his beloved heroine, from his devious enemy Vyasa. Turning to fiction after an award-winning travel book, Alice Albinia has written a brilliantly playful and genre-defying first novel. Ambitious and entertaining, Leela's Book weaves a tale of contemporary Delhi that crosses religious and social boundaries, reaching back into the origins of the Mahabharata itself.
