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A review by jessicaesquire
Immigrant, Montana by Amitava Kumar
4.0
There is a long, literary tradition of the bildungsroman. It is often a story of the author's fictional alter ego, a novel of ideas and politics, a story about love and lovers. There is also a more recent (at least as far as mainstream US literary fiction is concerned) literary tradition of the immigrant's story, the attempt to discover the self while straddling two cultures. IMMIGRANT, MONTANA takes both of these traditions and melds them into one ambitious, exciting, highly readable novel.
The book begins when Kailash gets to the US, a grad student in New York City recently from India, he is still forming his own identity. That journey to self-discovery becomes complicated by his journey to discover an entirely new country, and complicated even more by that country's refusal to acknowledge him as a normal person. The greatest joys of this book are when Kumar follows a question down line after line, moving in one direction and then another, piling complexity upon complexity. The voice and the ideas vibrate at a frequency that you can feel in your bones.
The style is both erratic and highly controlled, with footnotes and pictures and the ongoing question of how much is Kailash and how much is Amitava. Often reported like nonfiction, with side paths exploring Kailash's studies into both real and fictional political activists, the twining of fiction and nonfiction is one of the more satisfying I've seen in this type of novel. (More than once I found myself googling someone to see if they were real or a fictional version of a real person.) Kailash's study of global politics and the way America is almost always placed in a larger context that also considers countries like China and India opens up the book and opens up your view of the world and of Kailash's place in it.
The only real hesitation I have on this novel is part and parcel with a bildungsroman about a straight man in his twenties: its structure and its beating heart are all about the women he is involved with. It probably wouldn't be honest to write a book about this kind of protagonist without having the kind of lustful obsessions he has. And to be fair, the older Kailash writing about the younger Kailash can see with clear eyes how he mistreats his partners, how he objectifies them, and how it dooms his relationships. (Though it also seems quite possible that the older Kailash is still stuck in the very same pattern.) If you are a woman who has ever read a book, you will occasionally find yourself wearied and put off because you exist in the world and it can be exhausting to be constantly reminded of the way men look at you. But it is one of the less frustrating examples I have come across, and I was always willing to put up with it because the joys of the novel outweighed the annoyances. Just know that if you are in a place where you just cannot with male writers, you may want to give yourself some time before you read this book.
The book begins when Kailash gets to the US, a grad student in New York City recently from India, he is still forming his own identity. That journey to self-discovery becomes complicated by his journey to discover an entirely new country, and complicated even more by that country's refusal to acknowledge him as a normal person. The greatest joys of this book are when Kumar follows a question down line after line, moving in one direction and then another, piling complexity upon complexity. The voice and the ideas vibrate at a frequency that you can feel in your bones.
The style is both erratic and highly controlled, with footnotes and pictures and the ongoing question of how much is Kailash and how much is Amitava. Often reported like nonfiction, with side paths exploring Kailash's studies into both real and fictional political activists, the twining of fiction and nonfiction is one of the more satisfying I've seen in this type of novel. (More than once I found myself googling someone to see if they were real or a fictional version of a real person.) Kailash's study of global politics and the way America is almost always placed in a larger context that also considers countries like China and India opens up the book and opens up your view of the world and of Kailash's place in it.
The only real hesitation I have on this novel is part and parcel with a bildungsroman about a straight man in his twenties: its structure and its beating heart are all about the women he is involved with. It probably wouldn't be honest to write a book about this kind of protagonist without having the kind of lustful obsessions he has. And to be fair, the older Kailash writing about the younger Kailash can see with clear eyes how he mistreats his partners, how he objectifies them, and how it dooms his relationships. (Though it also seems quite possible that the older Kailash is still stuck in the very same pattern.) If you are a woman who has ever read a book, you will occasionally find yourself wearied and put off because you exist in the world and it can be exhausting to be constantly reminded of the way men look at you. But it is one of the less frustrating examples I have come across, and I was always willing to put up with it because the joys of the novel outweighed the annoyances. Just know that if you are in a place where you just cannot with male writers, you may want to give yourself some time before you read this book.