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swee_p's review against another edition
dark
emotional
mysterious
sad
slow-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
3.0
premxs's review against another edition
5.0
Saint X
with the insane rituals
of the self, for the self,
detritus drowned by
external wash immiscible
with intrinsic ejaculate.
entombed lies faith
in purity; profaned life,
mossed tongues lashed on
canvasses of the inverse,
sandpaper to slit his throat.
---x---
a terrible, devastating, stunning mess of a life, a book.
with the insane rituals
of the self, for the self,
detritus drowned by
external wash immiscible
with intrinsic ejaculate.
entombed lies faith
in purity; profaned life,
mossed tongues lashed on
canvasses of the inverse,
sandpaper to slit his throat.
---x---
a terrible, devastating, stunning mess of a life, a book.
coronaurora's review against another edition
3.0
I picked this one on a sentimental whim at the airport while returning from a wistful, laid-back holiday in lush and sunny North Goa. The book had the familiar place-names, a casual flip revealed a fair capture of the sights, the sounds of the places I was leaving behind and I was deeply intrigued by the book’s unusual premise to chronicle the forgotten modernist poets of India from the 70s and 80s. What a niche fringe concern for a subcontinental novel, and I took an instant like to this commitment to chart literary artists and bring it to a more mainstream audience. With echoes of Bolano’s The Savage Dectectives, my interest was piqued and I became more curious on the insights and overlaps after seeing Thayil’s past work involving poetry and editing of poetry anthologies on the inside of the book’s glorious hardback jacket.
However, much as I wanted to befriend this big unruly beast of a novel with all its polyphonic, polyphagic grievance for the forgotten martyrs to the cause of poetry, I was unable to lose myself in this world or bring myself to care about the eventual predictable fate of the tracked poet.
As our protagonist journalist, Dismas Bambai tracks this much feted poet-lord, an ambassador of some Hung Realist Poets Society who is on a downspiral to total obscurity somewhere in New York City and is preparing for a homecoming of sorts with one last retrospective in New Delhi of his acrylics and poetry, we only have a succession of clinical transcriptions of material accrued via interviews and brief wandering missions where he gets to meet and greet this ageing poet and/or share a joint or a drinking session. With each passing section, as new material is unearthed on this fast disappearing man, he somehow becomes less compelling and Bambai’s single-minded mission fails to have a hook other than a strange drive to have a compilation of an anthology which will lead to recognition, awards etc. This was not enough for me to sustain my interest, and Thayil does not package this resurrector of little-known literary souls with much personality. There is a stretch earlier on where we see Bambai slumming it in a smalltime South Asian classified-heavy rag production, but none of the attempted comedy or social observation there hit the right notes for us to care for the ensuing 450 pages.
My second grouse is that the character of Xavier in stretches that see him living out his secluded existence in differing and worsening degrees of disillusionment, besides soused in increasing amounts of alcohol and self-pity did not ever become a character who, for all the tortured greatness of his poems suggested by the breathless tracking by Bambai, I could empathise with. He peaked early, was celebrated for a bit, had his moment, fell out of times and favours, and not surprisingly, languished. For all intents and purposes, he still fared better than some of his more anonymous colleagues (not least the Untouchable Poet who never even got the spotlight!). I am afraid but seeing him alternatingly boast and fuss around women, alcohol and the glories past made me roll my eyes after a stretch (the length of this book does it few favours) and I could not find an emotional inroad to summon sympathy for his fractured soul.
The whole rambling resurrection project of these poets, for me, needed some more heart and more imagination to bind some part of us humbler non-poetic mortals to the epic disillusionment that plagues Xavier and his ilk. This failure, either mine (to decipher) or Thayil’s (to deliver) meant the novel’s straight-written parts were a total drag. This coupled with frustrating digressions (like in the first third, the whole bit where we get a Sikh immigrant being chased in a surreal scene post 9/11: juxtaposing tortured-artist angst on top of unasked-for immigrant-post 9/11 angst was unintentionally hilarious). I also felt uncertain about the various drug-addled trips and hallucinogenic rants that Thayil staged: they never quite packed the punch and/or were timed wrong and/or added nothing for me.
Which brings me to the stretches I did devour with relish: about half the novel is invested in chronicling testimonies/interviews from people who knew/continue to know Xavier. We have a certified insane clinician-mother, nosy neighbours, models and muses, school teachers, Indian and British professors, arts activists, peers, cultural commentators and many lapsed poets, each remembering their Xavier and the world of poetry around him and them. In the first few stretches, where Thayil is at his best, we have a curious picture formed of Xavier from an introverted schoolboy to a literary contrarian to ace bohemian with his curious, judgemental, oppressive silences on meeting people which are recollected again and again which give him and the book a menacing air, but sadly Thayil doesn’t do much with this. There are some playful scenes where we have him fearlessly drawing Indira Gandhi as a blob of black when he’s commissioned by her team for a portrait or a nonchalant meeting with VS Naipaul at the height of his literary powers or the bit where the Hung Realists found themselves in company of Allen Ginsberg. And I sorely wished it continued thus, part-whimsy, part-impression (almost like the recently feted Lincoln in the Bardo) where reminiscences and written documents hint at a person who would have lived with more experimental ways to throw insight into the poetic process and progress.
Regardless of my reservations about its success as a novel, I admired at an intellectual level its freshness in inciting a conversation about forgotten literary figures: these renegade poets living in some forgotten anarchic universe of their own making. Thayil goes to some length to bring to us these people from beyond the remote corners of literati chambers for which I am grateful. I would have liked it to be less opaque, more accessible, and its consistent rain of nihilistic spikes tempered suitably to make it less prickly and less daunting to revisit the people it so liberally name-drops and celebrates. It would also have helped bridge the interminable gulf from which a reader who is functional in the society could view these poets as the sensitive brothers and sisters who fall between the cracks in a world churning fast than the unpleasant, entitled as*holes who got tangled in trying to make too much sense of the fickleness and the chaos of the world around them.
The book enkindles the chaos and cruelty of the subcontinent’s streets that once inspired poetry from a society of subcontinent’s very own chocolate saints who later went on to rot. Through these savants of the written word, he inserts a worry about the longevity of art, the value of monk-like pursuing of self-expression and the place of poetry in a fast shifting world. But this experimental semi-fictional odyssey is only for the ones who are initiated or most committed to its cause.
However, much as I wanted to befriend this big unruly beast of a novel with all its polyphonic, polyphagic grievance for the forgotten martyrs to the cause of poetry, I was unable to lose myself in this world or bring myself to care about the eventual predictable fate of the tracked poet.
As our protagonist journalist, Dismas Bambai tracks this much feted poet-lord, an ambassador of some Hung Realist Poets Society who is on a downspiral to total obscurity somewhere in New York City and is preparing for a homecoming of sorts with one last retrospective in New Delhi of his acrylics and poetry, we only have a succession of clinical transcriptions of material accrued via interviews and brief wandering missions where he gets to meet and greet this ageing poet and/or share a joint or a drinking session. With each passing section, as new material is unearthed on this fast disappearing man, he somehow becomes less compelling and Bambai’s single-minded mission fails to have a hook other than a strange drive to have a compilation of an anthology which will lead to recognition, awards etc. This was not enough for me to sustain my interest, and Thayil does not package this resurrector of little-known literary souls with much personality. There is a stretch earlier on where we see Bambai slumming it in a smalltime South Asian classified-heavy rag production, but none of the attempted comedy or social observation there hit the right notes for us to care for the ensuing 450 pages.
My second grouse is that the character of Xavier in stretches that see him living out his secluded existence in differing and worsening degrees of disillusionment, besides soused in increasing amounts of alcohol and self-pity did not ever become a character who, for all the tortured greatness of his poems suggested by the breathless tracking by Bambai, I could empathise with. He peaked early, was celebrated for a bit, had his moment, fell out of times and favours, and not surprisingly, languished. For all intents and purposes, he still fared better than some of his more anonymous colleagues (not least the Untouchable Poet who never even got the spotlight!). I am afraid but seeing him alternatingly boast and fuss around women, alcohol and the glories past made me roll my eyes after a stretch (the length of this book does it few favours) and I could not find an emotional inroad to summon sympathy for his fractured soul.
The whole rambling resurrection project of these poets, for me, needed some more heart and more imagination to bind some part of us humbler non-poetic mortals to the epic disillusionment that plagues Xavier and his ilk. This failure, either mine (to decipher) or Thayil’s (to deliver) meant the novel’s straight-written parts were a total drag. This coupled with frustrating digressions (like in the first third, the whole bit where we get a Sikh immigrant being chased in a surreal scene post 9/11: juxtaposing tortured-artist angst on top of unasked-for immigrant-post 9/11 angst was unintentionally hilarious). I also felt uncertain about the various drug-addled trips and hallucinogenic rants that Thayil staged: they never quite packed the punch and/or were timed wrong and/or added nothing for me.
Which brings me to the stretches I did devour with relish: about half the novel is invested in chronicling testimonies/interviews from people who knew/continue to know Xavier. We have a certified insane clinician-mother, nosy neighbours, models and muses, school teachers, Indian and British professors, arts activists, peers, cultural commentators and many lapsed poets, each remembering their Xavier and the world of poetry around him and them. In the first few stretches, where Thayil is at his best, we have a curious picture formed of Xavier from an introverted schoolboy to a literary contrarian to ace bohemian with his curious, judgemental, oppressive silences on meeting people which are recollected again and again which give him and the book a menacing air, but sadly Thayil doesn’t do much with this. There are some playful scenes where we have him fearlessly drawing Indira Gandhi as a blob of black when he’s commissioned by her team for a portrait or a nonchalant meeting with VS Naipaul at the height of his literary powers or the bit where the Hung Realists found themselves in company of Allen Ginsberg. And I sorely wished it continued thus, part-whimsy, part-impression (almost like the recently feted Lincoln in the Bardo) where reminiscences and written documents hint at a person who would have lived with more experimental ways to throw insight into the poetic process and progress.
Regardless of my reservations about its success as a novel, I admired at an intellectual level its freshness in inciting a conversation about forgotten literary figures: these renegade poets living in some forgotten anarchic universe of their own making. Thayil goes to some length to bring to us these people from beyond the remote corners of literati chambers for which I am grateful. I would have liked it to be less opaque, more accessible, and its consistent rain of nihilistic spikes tempered suitably to make it less prickly and less daunting to revisit the people it so liberally name-drops and celebrates. It would also have helped bridge the interminable gulf from which a reader who is functional in the society could view these poets as the sensitive brothers and sisters who fall between the cracks in a world churning fast than the unpleasant, entitled as*holes who got tangled in trying to make too much sense of the fickleness and the chaos of the world around them.
The book enkindles the chaos and cruelty of the subcontinent’s streets that once inspired poetry from a society of subcontinent’s very own chocolate saints who later went on to rot. Through these savants of the written word, he inserts a worry about the longevity of art, the value of monk-like pursuing of self-expression and the place of poetry in a fast shifting world. But this experimental semi-fictional odyssey is only for the ones who are initiated or most committed to its cause.
kamila79's review
5.0
There are some authors who hypnotise me with their writing. Borges, Cortázar, Cărtărescu, Alameddine, Vuong, and now Thayil. In my mind I collect imaginary moments of happiness (next to the real ones I store in my heart) and one of them would be to sit on the floor with all of these writers, in silence, and listen to them converse about literature.
“The Book of Chocolate Saints” by Jeet Thayil is an original novel, constructed of a narrative plot in prose, of poems, as well as of interviews (or rather monologues) of various people, all with their own voice and distinctive personality. All that completes the portrayal of fictional character Newton Francis Xavier, a Goan poet and painter, the co-founder of the Mumbai-based Hung Realists poetry movement. The book spans several decades and evokes, among others, Goa in the 1940s and 1950s, contemporary Delhi and Bangalore, New York post-9/11, as well as Mumbai of the 1970s and 1980s. The trio: obnoxious and troubled Xavier, his uncompromising and fierce younger partner Goody Lol, and oftentimes annoying and gullible Xavier’s biographer Dismas Bambai, who chases the couple in the US and India, are all rather unpredictable, impulsive and very flawed. But who wants to read about perfect characters who never make mistakes? Thayil, not hiding the fact that he himself was for many years addicted to alcohol and drugs, was able to very convincingly depict the states of intoxication, self-destruction and self-delusion, invariably related to addiction. Megalomania combined with periods of self-doubt and paranoia, Xavier’s life-long companions, couldn’t have been painted better.
I read the book and marvelled: there is so much I don’t know! I felt as if I was invited to some secret meetings, during which relationships between various Indian poets I had never heard about were discussed. People lampooned them, talked about animosities and affinities between some of them and took them off their pedestals. I felt honoured to get a glimpse into the realm previously unknown to me. But isn’t it the power of literature - to open new worlds to a reader?
A marvellous, delirious, spellbinding, absolutely unmissable gem of a novel.
“The Book of Chocolate Saints” by Jeet Thayil is an original novel, constructed of a narrative plot in prose, of poems, as well as of interviews (or rather monologues) of various people, all with their own voice and distinctive personality. All that completes the portrayal of fictional character Newton Francis Xavier, a Goan poet and painter, the co-founder of the Mumbai-based Hung Realists poetry movement. The book spans several decades and evokes, among others, Goa in the 1940s and 1950s, contemporary Delhi and Bangalore, New York post-9/11, as well as Mumbai of the 1970s and 1980s. The trio: obnoxious and troubled Xavier, his uncompromising and fierce younger partner Goody Lol, and oftentimes annoying and gullible Xavier’s biographer Dismas Bambai, who chases the couple in the US and India, are all rather unpredictable, impulsive and very flawed. But who wants to read about perfect characters who never make mistakes? Thayil, not hiding the fact that he himself was for many years addicted to alcohol and drugs, was able to very convincingly depict the states of intoxication, self-destruction and self-delusion, invariably related to addiction. Megalomania combined with periods of self-doubt and paranoia, Xavier’s life-long companions, couldn’t have been painted better.
I read the book and marvelled: there is so much I don’t know! I felt as if I was invited to some secret meetings, during which relationships between various Indian poets I had never heard about were discussed. People lampooned them, talked about animosities and affinities between some of them and took them off their pedestals. I felt honoured to get a glimpse into the realm previously unknown to me. But isn’t it the power of literature - to open new worlds to a reader?
A marvellous, delirious, spellbinding, absolutely unmissable gem of a novel.
adityadabral's review
2.0
This book is all over the place. When it comes to narrative voices, timescales and locations, The Book of Chocolate Saints happily shifts through all of this with some frequency. At times it's elucidating and interesting, so I do appreciate the ambition to be a little unconventional but by the end I grew weary of hearing about the escapades of a wayward and frankly ridiculous main character. I get that he's at the end of his tether creatively and he's not meant to be endearing, but if you're going to write a book, the reader needs to develop an attachment to something. I couldn't even muster up pity or any meaningful emotion for the main character.
Speaking of which, the story follows the life of Newton Francis Xavier, an aging poet/painter preparing for a final celebration of his work in New Delhi. We get to see his inner circle of confidantes and in particular the strange Dismas Bambai, a man who drops his journalistic exploits to write a biography of Xavier, something which features heavily in the book through the format of interviews. Other interesting people in the ensemble of characters Thayil concocts include a religious con-artist, a neurotic editor and a stalker driving around in a van. That was something I did like about the book. There are many characters with the potential be compelling, but I never felt that quite came to fruition.
There are parts of the book which explored certain plot-lines in excess (take Amrik's soul searching in Arizona and his subsequent irrelevance to the story) and more intriguing questions (Newton's upbringing and relationships) which are touched upon but still seem cursory and sparse. Much is also made of the real literary movements that our fictitious protagonist has been involved in such as the Bombay Poets and the Hung Realists and while I did like these historical interludes, they ultimately were so long that calling it that won't suffice. Parts of the book felt like mere recitations of the past which were just dry.
Jeet Thayil can certainly write. At times the imagery he creates is mesmerising and vivid, but this seems to be too rare, and the irritatingly haphazard qualities of this book are simply too great to be overlooked.
Speaking of which, the story follows the life of Newton Francis Xavier, an aging poet/painter preparing for a final celebration of his work in New Delhi. We get to see his inner circle of confidantes and in particular the strange Dismas Bambai, a man who drops his journalistic exploits to write a biography of Xavier, something which features heavily in the book through the format of interviews. Other interesting people in the ensemble of characters Thayil concocts include a religious con-artist, a neurotic editor and a stalker driving around in a van. That was something I did like about the book. There are many characters with the potential be compelling, but I never felt that quite came to fruition.
There are parts of the book which explored certain plot-lines in excess (take Amrik's soul searching in Arizona and his subsequent irrelevance to the story) and more intriguing questions (Newton's upbringing and relationships) which are touched upon but still seem cursory and sparse. Much is also made of the real literary movements that our fictitious protagonist has been involved in such as the Bombay Poets and the Hung Realists and while I did like these historical interludes, they ultimately were so long that calling it that won't suffice. Parts of the book felt like mere recitations of the past which were just dry.
Jeet Thayil can certainly write. At times the imagery he creates is mesmerising and vivid, but this seems to be too rare, and the irritatingly haphazard qualities of this book are simply too great to be overlooked.
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