Review by Booklist Review
Known best for his nonfiction, including Bland Fanatics (2020), Mishra now presents a beautifully written novel that captures the complexities and challenges of growing up in India and the simultaneous struggle to find meaning and a way forward in life. The story is told by Arun, who speaks to a mysterious second-person audience referred to as "you." As Arun tells his story, readers and "you" learn details of his life: his strict, severe father and loving mother, the fierce competition to be accepted into the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology, his desire to follow a path of art and literature, and his descriptions of his fellow students. The narrative arc progresses into realms of tenderness and feeling when readers discover that "you" is a Muslim woman named Alia. Arun and Alia have a passionate, loving relationship, but as they grow increasingly intertwined, Arun struggles internally to reconcile his past, the present, and possible futures. In his search for a new kind of soulful enrichment, Arun risks everything, including his relationship with Alia, to do what many would consider to be unthinkable.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Mishra returns to fiction (after Bland Fanatics, a collection of criticism) with a circuitous story of an Indian man opting out of an ostensibly bright future. Arun Dwivedi, a literary translator, recounts his life to a writer named Alia, who is working on a book about India's new global power brokers with a focus on his former classmates at the cutthroat Indian Institute of Technology in the 1990s. He describes a fractured upbringing with an abusive father and a modest young adulthood after IIT, contrasted with that of two fellow lower-caste friends who went on to great heights. There's "financial wizard" Virendra, who makes a fortune in America, and social climber Aseem, who insinuates himself into high society as a writer. Arun, on the other hand, moves to a small Himalayan village to look after his abandoned mother. After Aseem introduces him to Alia, she invites him on a getaway to Pondicherry, where their relationship turns sexual. While away, Arun's mother dies and he makes an impulsive decision to follow Alia to London. Arun's reflections are nearly sunk by tedious philosophizing about India's place in the early 21st century and the rise of nationalism, but are saved by the searing portraits of purportedly successful Desis. There are plenty of insights, but the rambling structure and navel-gazing narration will tax readers' patience. Agent: ICM Partners. (Mar.)
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Review by Library Journal Review
An author of both fiction (The Romantics) and nonfiction (Age of Anger), Windham-Campbell Prize winner Mishra offers a deeply critical portrait of what he terms the "IIT generation" of educated Indians who made their fortunes in a rapidly changing India and globalizing world and of the personal and social costs of those changes. The novel opens on a young Hindu boy named Arun who's growing up in a rural Indian village. His parents scrimp to eventually send him to the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology (or IIT), hoping that he can better his financial future. At IIT, Arun meets Virendra and Assem, two young men from similar circumstances who become his lifelong friends. Following graduation, Virendra heads off to Wall Street and Assem to the Indian media while Arun remains in India, working first for Assem's literary journal and then as a freelance translator. Virendra eventually winds up convicted of insider trading, and Arun retreats to a remote Himalayan village, where his peaceful life is upended with the arrival of a beautiful and wealthy Muslim activist named Alia. Though opposites, they strike up a relationship, but Arun is uneasy in her world, and further scandal involving Assem upends Arun again. VERDICT A vivid, multifaceted study of India today.--Lawrence Rungren
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
An intense, probing novel examines rampant materialism and spiritual bankruptcy. Reprising concerns that informed several previous books, Mishra examines the consequences of capitalism, globalization, and the violence of greed on communities, families, and individuals. The narrator is Arun, who tells the story of his life and those of his friends Aseem and Virendra to Alia, a young writer aiming to expose the "Hollow Men" who have emerged from the so-called rise of the New India. Yearning to escape the squalor and humiliating caste system that marked their youth, the three, through dogged efforts, are accepted as students in a technical institute which, they believe, will launch them into a better future. "To be modern," Aseem often repeats, "is to trample on the past; it is to take charge, to decide being something rather than nothing, active rather than passive, a decision-maker rather than a drifter." Seduced by "fantasies of power," money, and sex, Aseem and Virenda reinvent themselves: In New York, Virenda becomes a billionaire. Aseem, failing as a writer of literary fiction--like Naipaul, whom he venerates as "the prototype of the early twenty-first-century globalised man"--instead finds celebrity "as an environmental activist, cultural impresario and intellectual entrepreneur of the Global South." Awash in money, he hobnobs with the international glitterati. Arun, meanwhile, beset by "a kind of guilt at wanting too much from the world," retreats to a Himalayan village where he works as a translator. Yet he, too, is lured to the West, following Alia. Through Arun's observations of educated, well-heeled liberals--Westerners and Westernized Indians--Mishra underscores the hypocrisy and pretentiousness of their overstressed "political and ideological commitments"; the behavior that Arun tries to emulate in "a series of impersonations--believable performances, with hardly any slips and fluffs, as an upper-caste Hindu"; and the painful trampling of his past. An astute, discomfiting journey into a wasteland. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
