Take a photo of a barcode or cover
3.57 AVERAGE
3.57 AVERAGE
Heartfelt and angry and never less than interesting, this is a fine novel in many ways. Was it worth the twenty year wait for another novel from Roy? Maybe not quite, but it's definitely worth reading.
Depois do “hype” acerca deste livro, o tema, definitivamente, cairá bem aos leitores britânicos dada a sua proximidade com a sua ex-colónia. Para mim, ou os temas excessivamente étnicos não são o meu forte (e não são) ou toda a narrativa é excessivamente rebuscada, confusa e, acima de tudo, entediante. Uma desilusão.
As much as I love her, I couldn’t get through to the end. It was too clunky.
emotional
reflective
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
challenging
emotional
medium-paced
challenging
dark
informative
reflective
sad
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
I was really invested in Anjum story and I still think Roy's writing is beautiful at times but this was so hard for me to understand, so fractured and messy, I was grateful that she tied up the ends but I feel I missed a huge amount of what this was actually about.
challenging
dark
emotional
mysterious
reflective
sad
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
The Ministry of Utmost Happiness weaves together stories of the conflicts that plagued India and the surrounding countries around the turn of the 21st century. Using the lives of Anjum and Tilo as a scaffold, the narrative moves through a diverse range of settings and traumas, never too far from either the great loves or the nightmares in the lives of these two women.
Both Anjum and Tilo have unusual backgrounds that mark them as outsiders: Anjum was born a hermaphrodite and leaves her family to live in a community of hijras, while Tilo was disowned and then adopted by her birth mother. Throughout the course of the story these two gather a group of others who were not intrinsically outsiders like them but instead were made so by the war: by their families being murdered, their values becoming alternative, their bodies wanted.
It's a novel filled with one sad story after another, and yet it manages humour and a huge amount of charm. It's charming in its characters' defiance, in their ability to build a life in the midst of all the death - this is illustrated literally by the group building a house in a graveyard, the living inhabitants sharing rooms with the graves they were built over.
I hugely value books that teach me a lot and this is certainly a novel that falls under that category - I didn't know anything about this conflict and so this was a kind of crash course which although by no means conclusive provided stepping stones from which to research. I think it's real talent that can manage to capture such an overarching view of a situation, which is what this book is. The two main(ish) characters (the ish included because there are a LOT of characters, which if reading again I would write down to recognise them faster when they reappear 100s of pages later) are given more fleshed out lives, but the rest are more snapshots and I think supposed to be representative of many experiences.
I did find I was very invested in Tilo's story, particularly the love between her and Musa, and I loved all the stories of the hijras and Anjum's mothering, but there were some sections of this book (I'm thinking really of the parts told in first person) which felt a bit out of place. Whilst reading I felt that if these weren't included it would be easier to follow, but having finished I did see that the stories all tied together and made sense of each other in the end. I think the main reason I resented these sections was that I missed the poetry of the third person prose when it was told from a character's viewpoint.
A review that is a bit all over the place - but that's sort of how the book is too. I don't think it's supposed to be an easy or entertaining read, and I appreciated that.
Both Anjum and Tilo have unusual backgrounds that mark them as outsiders: Anjum was born a hermaphrodite and leaves her family to live in a community of hijras, while Tilo was disowned and then adopted by her birth mother. Throughout the course of the story these two gather a group of others who were not intrinsically outsiders like them but instead were made so by the war: by their families being murdered, their values becoming alternative, their bodies wanted.
It's a novel filled with one sad story after another, and yet it manages humour and a huge amount of charm. It's charming in its characters' defiance, in their ability to build a life in the midst of all the death - this is illustrated literally by the group building a house in a graveyard, the living inhabitants sharing rooms with the graves they were built over.
I hugely value books that teach me a lot and this is certainly a novel that falls under that category - I didn't know anything about this conflict and so this was a kind of crash course which although by no means conclusive provided stepping stones from which to research. I think it's real talent that can manage to capture such an overarching view of a situation, which is what this book is. The two main(ish) characters (the ish included because there are a LOT of characters, which if reading again I would write down to recognise them faster when they reappear 100s of pages later) are given more fleshed out lives, but the rest are more snapshots and I think supposed to be representative of many experiences.
I did find I was very invested in Tilo's story, particularly the love between her and Musa, and I loved all the stories of the hijras and Anjum's mothering, but there were some sections of this book (I'm thinking really of the parts told in first person) which felt a bit out of place. Whilst reading I felt that if these weren't included it would be easier to follow, but having finished I did see that the stories all tied together and made sense of each other in the end. I think the main reason I resented these sections was that I missed the poetry of the third person prose when it was told from a character's viewpoint.
A review that is a bit all over the place - but that's sort of how the book is too. I don't think it's supposed to be an easy or entertaining read, and I appreciated that.
I got 100 pages in and just wasn’t quite feeling it. I’ll return to this again and imagine it will hook me the second time around once I dedicate some proper time to reading it. For now, time for something more gripping.
adventurous
challenging
dark
emotional
hopeful
mysterious
reflective
tense
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes