Distiller: Doni Faber
Rating: 3/5 Stars
The Ministry of Utmost Happiness
by Arundhati Roy
Alfred A. Knopf
First Edition
June 6, 2017
(444 pages)
My enjoyment of this book was
very uneven. When I first began, I re-read each page because it
seemed so dense and meticulously crafted, like poetry. It started out
following Anjum, a Hijra, who was born with both male and female
parts. She chose to be a woman eventually and joined a house where
others like her lived. When her heart was broken by a child she had
adopted, she moved into a graveyard.
About a third of the way
through, the narrative suddenly switches from third person to first
person (and began to follow a different character.) At this point, I became very disengaged. Who was this
person who had the audacity to speak from first person as if his
story pre-empted the character who seemed so much more prominent up
until now? He was an intelligence officer and in love with another
character, Tilo, a woman without definite heritage but who casts her
enchantment over several men.
Once the narrative settles back
into Tilo and then connects her with Anjum, I felt better.
The author tries to combine the
personal with the historic. Much of the latter half of the narrative
is about the conflict in Kashmir. Maybe I just didn't have enough
background information about this topic, but I had trouble connecting
with what was going on.
Also,
the writing style was very different from God
of Small Things.
God
of Small Things
uses very brief sentences and is cinematic in its feel. Ministry
of Utmost Happiness
was dense with similes that were at times difficult to follow.
The
emotional tone hovered somewhere between hope and despondency, never
convincingly settling in either camp. Perhaps the graveyard enclave
was meant to be hopeful amidst so much despair.
Overall,
I enjoyed it, but not as much as I was hoping I would.
0 comments:
Post a Comment