Book 5 - Jeet Thayil "Narcopolis"

Jeet Thayil "Narcopolis" (Faber & Faber)




I took me awhile to complete this novel. I had to keep scurrying to a decent dictionary to understand some of the Indian words used, as this is my first novel I have read from that Asian destination.

The prologue’s confusing, and quite dreamlike, making me feel both frustrated and intrigued at the same time—it was confusing, yes, but it was also pretty poetic. Yet on that day, frustration won out and I put it down. I was sorely tempted not to go back to it, but as one of the few Booker long-listed titles that sounded mildly interesting to me, I gave it another shot.

Thankfully, the rest of the book is much more straightforward, for lack of a better word. In one of the reviews, someone commented that there are so many characters that they couldn’t keep track of everyone, but I didn’t find that to be the case at all. 

The stories that were the most engaging—though I wish the author delved even deeper—were related to Dimple, the hijra, and Mr. Lee, the Chinese man that she befriends. Yet, the stories of all of the characters’ lives didn’t really cohere. Even then, I didn’t mind it so much because I could still treat it as short stories to enjoy individually; plus Thayil was great at capturing the seedy feel of Bombay during that time in the seventies, and that went a long way in keeping me going. Things started to fall apart in the last one or two chapters—t hey were boring and I started to get the sense that the author was trying too hard to ram his messages in before the end in a not-so-subtle or poetic way. I get that Thayil was trying to give a portrait of a changing city, but the attempt fell short in this book. However, I still have warm feelings towards the novel because it’s evident that Thayil has a lot of potential as a storyteller, even if this first novel of his was an imperfect effort.