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marc129 's review for:
The Ministry of Utmost Happiness
by Arundhati Roy
In an newspaper interview about what is only her 2nd novel Arundhati Roy compared this book to a city. I have no better introduction to the hybrid style of this book than this excerpt: “Big cities are often chaotic and confusing for outsiders. It takes a while to find your way around. There are large boulevards and small roads. Some find their place in the city, others don't. Here and there there are roadblocks. It is the same with the structure of this book. There are dead ends, not everything is neatly worked out. The book has a hybrid and noisy character, it contains pamphlets, police reports, letters. That suits the noisy world in which we live.”
Hybrid and noisy, you can surely say that: this book is swarming with characters, Roy uses different styles and registers, and above all, she screams her activist messages very loudly from the rooftops. The latter is particularly striking: Roy constantly addresses the various injustices that occur in Indian society (and by extension the globalized world). Ethnic violence, discrimination against transgenders, the corruption and abuse of power by politicians and government officials, the powerlessness of ecological activists and of small, "fallen" people, etc…. it is all covered, constantly repeated in different forms and especially in the part about Kashmir also very crudely. So, this is an extremely political book, in which Roy refers to concrete scandals and abuses and to politicians who today promote extremism and discrimination. Especially the message to the current Prime Minister of India, the extreme Hindu nationalist Mohdi, is very clear.
But of course, there is not only politics in this book. If you are looking for a common denominator, then I would say this novel is essentially about limits and delimitations and how people cope with it in different ways. To make this theme concrete, Roy presents a whole mosaic of characters and stories, almost tumbling over each other. Doing this she wants to illustrate the chaos of (Indian) life, but unfortunately it diminishes the power of her story. As a reader, for example, you would be only too happy that she had worked out the main character Ajum, the "hijra", the transgender woman born in a male body, in a deeper, psychological way; Ajum certainly is the unifying character in this novel, and Roy to a certain extent weaves a poetic universe around this epic figure, but still, Ajum doesn’t emerge as a ‘full’ character.
Roy also demands quite a bit from her reader. This novel is teeming with references to Indian history, situations and concepts that require considerable prior knowledge. I have the impression that Roy thinks that the reader should make the effort to get involved, and she has a right to think that. But it doesn't make reading easier. On the one hand, this book gives an overwhelming impression of the enormous diversity of India, but on the other hand, the literary content engorges just a little too much in the political message. (2.5 stars)
Hybrid and noisy, you can surely say that: this book is swarming with characters, Roy uses different styles and registers, and above all, she screams her activist messages very loudly from the rooftops. The latter is particularly striking: Roy constantly addresses the various injustices that occur in Indian society (and by extension the globalized world). Ethnic violence, discrimination against transgenders, the corruption and abuse of power by politicians and government officials, the powerlessness of ecological activists and of small, "fallen" people, etc…. it is all covered, constantly repeated in different forms and especially in the part about Kashmir also very crudely. So, this is an extremely political book, in which Roy refers to concrete scandals and abuses and to politicians who today promote extremism and discrimination. Especially the message to the current Prime Minister of India, the extreme Hindu nationalist Mohdi, is very clear.
But of course, there is not only politics in this book. If you are looking for a common denominator, then I would say this novel is essentially about limits and delimitations and how people cope with it in different ways. To make this theme concrete, Roy presents a whole mosaic of characters and stories, almost tumbling over each other. Doing this she wants to illustrate the chaos of (Indian) life, but unfortunately it diminishes the power of her story. As a reader, for example, you would be only too happy that she had worked out the main character Ajum, the "hijra", the transgender woman born in a male body, in a deeper, psychological way; Ajum certainly is the unifying character in this novel, and Roy to a certain extent weaves a poetic universe around this epic figure, but still, Ajum doesn’t emerge as a ‘full’ character.
Roy also demands quite a bit from her reader. This novel is teeming with references to Indian history, situations and concepts that require considerable prior knowledge. I have the impression that Roy thinks that the reader should make the effort to get involved, and she has a right to think that. But it doesn't make reading easier. On the one hand, this book gives an overwhelming impression of the enormous diversity of India, but on the other hand, the literary content engorges just a little too much in the political message. (2.5 stars)