Jeet Thayil
Paperback | Pages: 292 pages Rating: 3.36 | 7593 Users | 764 Reviews
Itemize Books In Favor Of Narcopolis
| Original Title: | Narcopolis |
| ISBN: | 0571275761 (ISBN13: 9780571275762) |
| Edition Language: | English URL http://www.faber.co.uk/work/narcopolis/9780571275762/ |
| Literary Awards: | Booker Prize Nominee (2012), Man Asian Literary Prize Nominee (2012), The Hindu Literary Prize Nominee (2012), DSC Prize for South Asian Literature (2013) |
Narrative Supposing Books Narcopolis
Shuklaji Street, in Old Bombay. In Rashid's opium room the air is thick and potent. A beautiful young woman leans to hold a long-stemmed pipe over a flame, her hair falling across her dark eyes. Around her, men sprawl and mutter in the gloom, each one drifting with his own tide. Here, people say that you introduce only your worst enemy to opium.Outside, stray dogs lope in packs. Street vendors hustle. Hookers call for custom through the bars of their cages as their pimps slouch in doorways in the half-light. There is an underworld whisper of a new terror: the Pathar Maar, the stone killer, whose victims are the nameless, invisible poor. There are too many of them to count in this broken city.
Narcopolis is a rich, chaotic, hallucinatory dream of a novel that captures the Bombay of the 1970s in all its compelling squalor. With a cast of pimps, pushers, poets, gangsters and eunuchs, it is a journey into a sprawling underworld written in electric and utterly original prose.
Describe Containing Books Narcopolis
| Title | : | Narcopolis |
| Author | : | Jeet Thayil |
| Book Format | : | Paperback |
| Book Edition | : | Special Edition |
| Pages | : | Pages: 292 pages |
| Published | : | February 2nd 2012 by Faber & Faber (first published January 31st 2012) |
| Categories | : | Fiction. Cultural. India |
Rating Containing Books Narcopolis
Ratings: 3.36 From 7593 Users | 764 ReviewsAppraise Containing Books Narcopolis
This was a major disappointment. It started off strong; the opening tells you how competent the author is as a writer. Where the book fails, is in making you care about any of the characters, beyond a slight sympathy for Dimple. Most of the book is written from the point of view of one character or another who is about to get high/is high/is coming down from being high, and that vantage point gets tiresome really fast. We are taken in a no-holds-barred tour of the drug addict's life in Bombay,
Truth is Heroin is Beauty.-Narcopolis, Jeet Thayil.At first glance, Narcopolis is a novel about drugs. At second glance, it is a novel about lust. At third, it is a novel about Bombay. And, when the reader finishes the last breathtaking page of Jeet Thayils debut Man Booker long-lister, Narcopolis will again have transformed into being about something else entirely.So goes the magic of a great book.In an interview with NPR, Thayil speaks with a poets voice: confidant and yet careful, giving
A very strange book indeed. In fact, I'd say I've never read anything like it before.Jeet Thayil's Booker-nominated novel starts out in Bombay of the 1970s, when the narrator Dom Ullis arrives in the city, having been deported back to India from the States on account of his substance abuse problems. He meets a multitude of different characters like Dimple the eunuch, Newton Xavier the painter, Rumi the frustarted married man & many others at Rashidbhai's chandu khana (opium den) in Shuklaji
Because now there's time enough not to hurry, to light the lamp and open the window to the moon and take a moment to dream of a great and broken city, because when the day starts its business I'll have to stop, these are night-time tales that vanish in the sunlight like vampire dustThis will be a fairly short review as I dont want to spend too much time talking about a book I disliked. I stopped short of hating it just but I certainly didnt like it. The writing is good - in places very good,
Narcopolis isn't so much a story as a non-linear network of little stories and vignettes: a sort of tapestry of pieces of fiction and character studies. The characters include an opium/heroin addict who initially acts as narrator (although the narrative soon wanders away from him and takes on a life of its own), several opium den 'entrepreneurs', a eunuch prostitute and a degenerate poet-slash-artist. Set in Bombay, and more specificially on Shuklaji Street where Rashid's opium house is located,
24th book for 2018.A haunting, hallucinatory account of Mumbai's opium drug culture in the 1970s. Written by a ex-addict poet there is a realism here that captures both the beauty and horror of this vanished subculture. One of my favorite books for the year so far. 5-stars.
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