A Review of Deepa Annapara’s Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line (Random House, 2020).

[jacobballew]

 

So, it took me a couple of tries to really dig into this novel. I had a little bit of trouble getting into the discursive voice that predominates in Deepa Annapara’s Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line (Random House, 2020), which is given over to a young teen named Jai. Let’s let the editorial description give us some more information: “In a sprawling Indian city, three friends venture into the most dangerous corners to find their missing classmate. . . .Down market lanes crammed with too many people, dogs, and rickshaws, past stalls that smell of cardamom and sizzling oil, below a smoggy sky that doesn’t let through a single blade of sunlight, and all the way at the end of the Purple metro line lies a jumble of tin-roofed homes where nine-year-old Jai lives with his family. From his doorway, he can spot the glittering lights of the city’s fancy high-rises, and though his mother works as a maid in one, to him they seem a thousand miles away. Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line plunges readers deep into this neighborhood to trace the unfolding of a tragedy through the eyes of a child as he has his first perilous collisions with an unjust and complicated wider world. Jai drools outside sweet shops, watches too many reality police shows, and considers himself to be smarter than his friends Pari (though she gets the best grades) and Faiz (though Faiz has an actual job). When a classmate goes missing, Jai decides to use the crime-solving skills he has picked up from TV to find him. He asks Pari and Faiz to be his assistants, and together they draw up lists of people to interview and places to visit. But what begins as a game turns sinister as other children start disappearing from their neighborhood. Jai, Pari, and Faiz have to confront terrified parents, an indifferent police force, and rumors of soul-snatching djinns. As the disappearances edge ever closer to home, the lives of Jai and his friends will never be the same again. Drawing on real incidents and a spate of disappearances in metropolitan India, Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line is extraordinarily moving, flawlessly imagined, and a triumph of suspense. It captures the fierce warmth, resilience, and bravery that can emerge in times of trouble and carries the reader headlong into a community that, once encountered, is impossible to forget.”

 

I had a mixed reaction to this novel when I finished it and let me proceed by stating I am only giving my readerly opinion. As a text with a politically engaged vision, this novel is an unqualified success. You certainly understand how the children and teens who populate the slums of the city are considered to be a kind of societal discard, so once they start disappearing, the slum inhabitants cannot rely on any official entities for help. The tragedy is that one of the most invested individuals in those disappearances in none other than our young narrator, who, without power or influence, really does try to see if he can make headway into these various mysteries. Annapara employs intercuts throughout the novel to show us the circumstances that lead up to each disappearance. There is enough ambiguity in each encounter to make you wonder who is behind these acts. Even when the novel eventually turns to the possibility that there is a child trafficking ring, there is truly no closure, which is perfectly apt given that what we have here is ultimately a kind of noir. My mixed reaction is that I found the novel a bit too episodic. Indeed, as each disappearance piles on to the next without any resolution to the last one, the lack of narrative resolution ultimately produced a sense of readerly ennui in me, even as I understood the gravity of the contexts that Annapara was providing us. But, I suppose, such a reaction makes one wonder about the balance one must strike between a compelling narratively plotted story and the politically textured work. To be sure, the novel’s focus on the trio of budding sleuths—Jai is working very hard alongside Pari and Faiz—makes for a winning combination, so there’s quite a lot to admire about this debut.

 

Buy the book Here:

 

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/609915/djinn-patrol-on-the-purple-line-by-deepa-anappara/

 

A Review of Aravind Adiga's Amnesty

[jacobballew]

This review is covering Aravind Adiga’s Amnesty (Scribner, 2020). I’ve been a fan of Adiga since reading both The White Tiger and Between the Assassinations. Most readers will be familiar with Adiga since The White Tiger won the Booker Prize way back in the day. I still recall how I tried to listen to the audiobook of The White Tiger on a drive down from the Bay Area to Southern California and only seemed to understand about 25% of what I heard. But I digress! Let’s get back to Amnesty: the official page gives us this description: “Danny—formerly Dhananjaya Rajaratnam—is an illegal immigrant in Sydney, Australia, denied refugee status after he fled from Sri Lanka. Working as a cleaner, living out of a grocery storeroom, for three years he’s been trying to create a new identity for himself. And now, with his beloved vegan girlfriend, Sonja, with his hidden accent and highlights in his hair, he is as close as he has ever come to living a normal life. But then one morning, Danny learns a female client of his has been murdered. The deed was done with a knife, at a creek he’d been to with her before; and a jacket was left at the scene, which he believes belongs to another of his clients—a doctor with whom Danny knows the woman was having an affair. Suddenly Danny is confronted with a choice: Come forward with his knowledge about the crime and risk being deported? Or say nothing, and let justice go undone? Over the course of this day, evaluating the weight of his past, his dreams for the future, and the unpredictable, often absurd reality of living invisibly and undocumented, he must wrestle with his conscience and decide if a person without rights still has responsibilities. Propulsive, insightful, and full of Aravind Adiga’s signature wit and magic, Amnesty is both a timeless moral struggle and a universal story with particular urgency today.”

A couple of things to note right off the bat. The novel is certainly at first influenced by the mystery plot, as readers wonder who killed the female client, whose name is Radha. Danny has a good idea about who it actually is, but Adiga takes some time letting us into all that Danny knows and has experienced. As we discover, Radha had been having a tumultuous affair with a man by the name of Prakash.


**Spoiler**

( Read more... )

 

 Another intriguing element to this novel is the form and narrative approach. Adiga employs a kind of stream-of-consciousness style that reminded me somewhat of Woolf’s prose. Perhaps, not coincidentally, Adiga also employs rough time markers throughout the day to give the sense of immediacy to Danny’s day. I have to admit that I found Adiga’s aesthetic approach a bit challenging from the readerly angle. There was a higher level of fragmentation due to the narrative perspective approach that Adiga uses. Nevertheless, the novel makes for an intriguing consideration of diasporic migration as well as the complications of South Asian/Anglophone identity formations.

Buy the Book Here:

https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Amnesty/Aravind-Adiga/9781982127244

A Review of Kiran Millwood Hargraves’s The Mercies (Little, Brown and Company)

[jacobballew]

 

Okay, so this novel SURPRISED ME. I absolutely loved it. I found the prose absolutely stunning, and the story swept me away. In any case, let’s let the official page get us started: “Finnmark, Norway, 1617. Twenty-year-old Maren Magnusdatter stands on the craggy coast, watching the sea break into a sudden and reckless storm. Forty fishermen, including her brother and father, are drowned and left broken on the rocks below. With the menfolk wiped out, the women of the tiny Arctic town of Vardø must fend for themselves. Three years later, a stranger arrives on their shore. Absalom Cornet comes from Scotland, where he burned witches in the northern isles. He brings with him his young Norwegian wife, Ursa, who is both heady with her husband’s authority and terrified by it. In Vardø, and in Maren, Ursa sees something she has never seen before: independent women. But Absalom sees only a place untouched by God, and flooded with a mighty evil. As Maren and Ursa are drawn to one another in ways that surprise them both, the island begins to close in on them, with Absalom’s iron rule threatening Vardø’s very existence.”

 

The fact that Hargraves’s novel is so close to Morrison’s A Mercy is no accident. They’re both set in the 17^th century and deal with the problem of gender and otherness in a time when men’s rights establish so much of a given community’s protocol. The problem for the women of Vardø is that they take it upon themselves to survive, something that raises the suspicions of the pastor who eventually joins them and later a local bureaucrat. For those that are aware of the historical circumstances, you know where this novel is headed. I did not, but even as there are so many clues that things are going to go very badly, I kept hoping that Hargrave might be writing something counterfactual. The brilliance of this novel is in the unsentimental yet effortless pacing that occurs in relation to the connection between Ursa and Maren. I had little idea about where this particular plot would go and ever more worried, as it becomes apparent what is going on with the witch
trials.

Also, I learned quite a bit more about what we might call Norwegian racialization in the 17^th century, at least with respect to indigeneity. The target of much of the suspicion falls on the Sámi people; they are suspected to deal in dark magics. You’re worried not only for any of the Sámi characters, but any of the characters that show any sort of sympathy of goodwill toward these peoples (which include Maren). While the conclusion is incredibly dark, Hargrave does provide readers with a minor opening for which to believe that there could be something still possible. Of course, what will carry us in this space of historical tragedy is Hargrave’s absolutely beautiful prose. A definite standout for me this year, right up there with Simon Jimenez’s Vanished Birds and Tishani Doshi’s Small Days and Nights.

 

 

Buy the Book Here:

https://www.littlebrown.com/titles/kiran-millwood-hargrave/the-mercies/9780316529228/

A Review of Gish Jen’s The Resisters (Knopf, 2020)

[jacobballew]

 

Hardcover | $26.95
Published by Knopf
Feb 04, 2020 | 320 Pages | 5-5/8 x 8-1/4 | ISBN 9780525657217

Gish Jen has returned to fiction! There’ve been a couple of nonfictional books that have come out, so I know some of us has been recently waiting for Jen’s next fictional offering, which has appeared in the guise of a sports/science fictional novel: The Resisters (Knopf, 2020). Let’s let Jen’s official site give us the set-up: “The time: not so long from now. The place: AutoAmerica. The land: half under water. The Internet: one part artificial intelligence, one part surveillance technology, and oddly human–even funny. The people: Divided. The angel-fair “Netted” have jobs, and literally occupy the high ground. The copper-toned “Surplus” live on swampland if they’re lucky, on water if they’re not. The story: To a Surplus couple–he once a professor, she still a lawyer–is born a Blasian girl with a golden arm. At two, Gwen is hurling her stuffed animals from the crib; by ten, she can hit whatever target she likes. Her teens find her happily playing in an underground baseball league. When AutoAmerica rejoins the Olympics, though–with a special eye on beating ChinRussia–Gwen attracts interest. Soon she finds herself playing ball with the Netted even as her mother challenges the very foundations of this divided society. A moving and important story of an America that seems only too possible, The Resisters is also the story of one family struggling to maintain its humanity in circumstances that threaten their every value–even their very existence. Extraordinary and ordinary, charming and electrifying, this is Gish Jen at the height of her powers - and at her most irresistible.”

 

It’s interesting that the description only describes Gwen, as the novel is probably as much about her mother, as it is about Gwen. This novel is one of those few types that are narrated in the first person but not autodiegetic (ugh, narratology term I know). What I mean is the novel is basically narrated in the first person by Gwen’s dad, Grant, but he is more of an observer than a driver of action. Never is this fact more apparent than in the section where Gwen goes to the land of the netted, where she attends Net U, and practices with the U’s baseball team. She’s so talented that she simultaneously negotiates the admittance of her sometimes friend, sometimes enemy Ondi (also Blasian). Ondi’s family and Gwen’s family do have some overlaps, as members of their family have been asked to CrossOver, the term used to describe the few Surplus individuals who might become Netted. In any case, Gwen’s mom didn’t CrossOver, and Gwen’s just as conflicted about the possibility that she can Crossover. Eventually, Gwen gets sick of the internal politics of Net U and the life of the netted, and she returns to the land of the Surplus. The back half of the novel is definitely the strongest: I read this portion at full speed. The novel begins to veer into something that I can best describe as a mash-up of The Stepford Wives and A Wrinkle in Time. The mix of baseball and science fiction was intriguing, and I totally enjoyed it. I can’t really recall another narrative that mixed the two so well. But, perhaps, the most interesting “character” of this particular novel is not any of the human figurations, but the massive, self-learning artificial intelligence entity known as Nettie, who sees all and apparently seems to hear all. Reading up on surveillance capitalism, I see how this novel fits quite well within that paradigm.