Reviews with content warning for Murder - L'età del male

Rating: 4/5 stars

A Mercedes runs over five people on the streets of New Delhi, setting in motion an epic family saga involving three characters from very different backgrounds and families.

Everyone in the world seems to be reading this book recently, and it’s easy to see why—it’s unique and captivating, with beautifully written prose and insightful commentary on class and colonialism. And as literary fiction and a family saga but with a crime fiction edge, Age of Vice has something to offer fans of many different genres.

Still, while I absolutely understand the appeal, I also felt that the book was a bit over-long: it’s nearly 600 pages, but most of that is dedicated to providing a level of deep background into the characters that I didn’t always find necessary. The story is clearly meant to be a slow burn, but I occasionally found it a bit *too* slow, and wanted more plot and action, especially after such an explosive beginning.

All of that said, this book has a lot of positives that outweigh the negatives. The writing is incredibly cinematic and I know that it will make for an incredible miniseries or movie (rights were sold in a bidding war years before publication!) And, the payoff of the ending was big enough that I’ll definitely pick up the second book in the planned trilogy when it releases.

Recommended to anyone, but especially if you like: epic family sagas; The Godfather but set in India; cinematic novels

CW: Sexual assault/rape; child abuse; murder/death/death of parent; drug abuse/use; torture; classism; violence generally

Content Warnings

kirstym25's review against another edition

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dark mysterious medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.5

Content Warnings

egmamaril's review against another edition

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challenging dark tense fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.75

Woof. A 3.75 because it bummed me out so badly, but I did read it really quickly.

Content Warnings

bookshelf_al's review against another edition

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dark tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.5

Content Warnings

noble_editorial's review against another edition

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dark emotional mysterious reflective sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

This author is a superb talent, so it truly saddens me to withhold my review until HarperCollins agrees to meet with its employees and negotiate a fair deal with the union. A living wage and diversity in publishing are critical issues that HC is choosing to ignore.

Content Warnings

berylbird's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging dark emotional reflective sad tense fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

Ajay is born into poverty, a Dalit or untouchable. His parents scavenge and live on a knife’s edge of existence. When their goat gets loose and eats the neighbor’s spinach, it will lead to unthinkable consequences, one of which results in Ajay being taken into captivity and carried far away from the place he knew as home in Uttar Pradesh. In a cage with other boys, the totality of this experience becomes like a blanket of horror that informs the person that eight-year-old Ajay will become. Thankfully, he ends up with people that treat him well as far as feeding him and not abusing him, but they expect a man’s work from him. Here, he learns to associate happiness with pleasing others. These feelings of pleasing others Ajay conjoins with feelings of security and protection, forming one of the major themes of the book, vulnerability versus invincibility. This theme will at times overlap with the theme of action and power versus passivity.

When Ajay is a teenager, he meets Sunny Wadia, the charismatically handsome playboy heir to his father’s gangster throne. At that time, Ajay is working in a cafe, where Sunny hangs out with a group of friends (those in thrall of Sunny’s money and influence). Ajay waits on Sunny hand and foot. Ajay is content to work like this, but a girl in the group calls him, “puppy.” Sunny is impressed enough with Ajay to offer him work in Delhi. In Delhi, Ajay becomes Sunny’s most loyal servant, “his driver, his butler, his everything… Ajay is the beating heart of Sunny’s world. Wordless, faceless, content.” Eli, a young man trained in the Israeli Defence Forces teaches Ajay the Israeli martial arts known as Krav Maga. While Ajay becomes capable, Eli tells him that he lacks the spark of violence that is needed to become fully fluent in the art.

In Delhi, Ajay becomes aware of the abject poverty of his birth. When Sunny meets Neda, a young woman from an intellectual family, Ajay sees how close they become. For the first time in his life, Ajay becomes aware of his own brokenness; he realizes that it’s possible he will never be able to become intimate with another person in the same way. This awareness in Ajay, I see as character growth. At the same time, Ajay is also afflicted with the blindness of an illusory fantasy world. He begins to think of returning home to Uttar Pradesh (UP) as a big man in his safari suit, a man of means and success with enough money to elevate his poverty-stricken family. “I am returning as a big man, a man of means, a success. Even as he imagines this homecoming, a dark part of him knows it is a lie.” The second major theme is awareness versus blindness, at times a willful blindness and at times, just a pitch dark unknowing. These are conflicts along with trying to form a sense of identity that swirl at the heart of the novel. Who is Ajay? He is becoming known as a Wadia man. Sunny even calls Ajay his brother. When Sunny learns that Ajay is from UP, he says, “we spring from the same soil.”

Sunny Wadia is also conflicted about his evolving sense of identity. He understands much of where his father’s wealth has come from yet toys with his own fantasies of building a major city along the Yamuna River in Delhi. He makes himself willfully blind as to how the flooding of Yamuna makes this impossible and regards the relocation of the slum residents as easily managed. He imagines himself as a patron of the arts and a do-gooder but as the novel progresses it becomes easier and easier to see how difficult it will be for Sunny to access his father’s wealth and remain this good person of his fantasy. Sunny is becoming complicit with his father’s actions by flying in exotic foods at exorbitant prices to his extravagant parties while indulging in drugs and alcohol, even as he continues to spin his dreams.

The social conscience of the novel is Dean Saldanha, a journalist at The Post. He sees the poor people of Delhi and writes about them and their living conditions in the slums and illegal settlements along the Yamuna River and in other places in Delhi. “He wanted to paint this shifting, unstable city in words, wanted to immortalize the daily struggles of its citizens.” Dean is a secondary character, but we learn more about Neda, his assistant, who often shares a byline with him, in how she compares herself to him.

“All Neda’s life, this was a part of Delhi that she saw and didn’t see. The slums had always been there; every time she crossed the river she looked down on the ramshackle city clinging to the banks. They were inevitable, they were ugly, they induced shame, guilt, in momentary slashes, but their people were submerged in her mind. If she thought about any of it at all, she thought it was Delhi, an eyesore, a sign of failure. But Dean saw the slums as people, and he saw their destruction as a tragedy.”

Again, the theme of awareness versus blindness comes up. It is often tempting to become blind to societal ills, especially when we feel that nothing can be done to bring about change. Yet, I feel that Deepti Kapoor is warning us against this blindness and shows how even though we may feel hopeless to bring about change, that to become numb to reality is a blindness that we cannot afford because it allows us to keep telling ourselves lies. Lies that may keep us from affecting change if an opportunity ever presents itself.

I have never been interested in reading gangster books, but it was the one selection of BOTM that intrigued me, and I’m glad I chose it. The author is skilled and has crafted an enthralling epic. Deepti Kapoor, in an NPR interview, describes Ajay as an <b> “oppressed everyman,” </b> and said that he is based on a young man she met while traveling. She describes seeing this faceless class of servants waiting on the wealthy. The book also seems to come from Kapoor’s sense of loss as her father died while she was at university, then not long after that, her first boyfriend died. She admits in an interview with <i>thehindu.com</i> that “Neda has parts of me. There’s a core of my life in the novel.” I felt this while I was reading about Neda, that the author had imparted something of herself into the way Neda was aware of and at the same time lamented her passivity. It was very powerful.

This is not a perfect novel. A new character is introduced at the end and his inclusion is not as smooth as I would have wished. The language and violence are gritty and while I did not think it sensationalized, there may be some who will. Every trigger warning you can imagine can be applied. While some are describing this novel as a ‘masala potboiler,’ I believe Kapoor has brought to life some exceptional characters that will be on my mind for quite some time. Ajay’s experiences and transformation are all too heartbreakingly real.

Content Warnings

sarah3492's review against another edition

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dark fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.75

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