I liked Salman Rushdie's works, I liked it enough that I have read ten of his books by now. But this one just was flat bizarre. It's short, but I am glad it was. If it were anything longer than what it is, then I'd probably blow up. It's tremendously complicated, but it doesn't really have a point. As is typical with Rushdie's works, there's a lot of narrative embedding, but this one just meandered left and right, sashayed back and forth from reality and magic, with no end in sight. And as I was two-thirds done with the book, I just wanted it to end.
It's essentially a story about an Indian rich man. He has had a multi-faceted life. He was an academic, and that bored the hell out of him, so he became a dollmaker. But then, life imitates art, and his puppets take a life of their own, in many different ways. Eventually, he has a lot of anger within him, and because he almost killed his family one day, he decides to escape London and go to New York instead. Unfortunately, that does not solve his problem, and sure enough, there are more problems to come, involving love triangles and even a bizarre fictional South Pacific country with a dictator that may or may not be a cyborg.
What a convoluted story. At some point I encountered the term hysterical realism, and while I am not a literary critic, I definitely found the prose hysterical. I mean, I hoped that when one writes a very manically-detailed prose, there must be some point. But eventually I lost what the point was supposed to be. It just became manic. I mean, if you thought that the story can be absurd, then this level of absurdity is beyond what you would probably expect. Come on, it even involves a serial killer that consistently targets young women and killing them using concrete slabs!
Oh well, I suppose brilliant writers also have their bad days. I definitely consider this as a bad way to start reading Rushdie, I must say. If you want to try out his works, don't begin with this one. You'll just get furious, at least that's what happened to me. Perhaps that was the intention of the book all along? I give this book 2 out of 5 stars.
See my other book reviews here.
