This ravishing, magnificent book reinvents what a novel can do and can be. For this reason, they are as steely as they are fragile, and they never surrender. Its heroes are people who have been broken by the world they live in and then rescued, mended by love-and by hope. It is told in a whisper, in a shout, through tears and sometimes with a laugh. The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is at once an aching love story and a decisive remonstration. Tilottama is as much of a presence as she is an absence in the lives of the three men who loved her. A baby appears quite suddenly on a pavement, a little after midnight, in a crib of litter. The Ministry of Utmost Happiness takes us on a journey of many years-the story spooling outwards from the cramped neighbourhoods of Old Delhi into the burgeoning new metropolis and beyond, to the Valley of Kashmir and the forests of Central India, where war is peace and peace is war, and where, from time to time, ‘normalcy’ is declared.Īnjum, who used to be Aftab, unrolls a threadbare carpet in a city graveyard that she calls home. Genre: Literary Fiction / Indian Culture and politics / Contemporary Publisher: Hamish Hamilton (Penguin Random House India) The Ministry of Utmost Happiness by Arundhati Roy
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |