NARCOPOLIS

Name: NARCOPOLIS
Author: Jeet Thayil
ISBN: 978-1-59420-330-5

by Jeet Thayil ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 12, 2012

Lyrical, poignant and pensive; challenging for its abundant Indian-isms (“She told only one girak that she was leaving, a...

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A tightly packed saga, shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, of drug-ruled lives in the back streets of Mumbai, which longtime resident (and former addict) Thayil insists on calling Bombay.

Do not call him Ishmael, though he is a castoff and exile. Of the narrator of this descent into the subcontinental demimonde, we know little, at least at first: A disembodied voice says, “since I’m the one telling it and you don’t know who I am, let me say that we’ll get to the who of it but not right now...these are nighttime tales that vanish in sunlight, like vampire dust.” Very well, then. The vampires in question are the denizens of opium dens and brothels in the megacity’s back alleys, along roads choked with feces and animal corpses, with the “poor and deranged.” The time is the 1970s, drifting into later decades, and the narrative spotlight soon falls on one such resident, Dimple, a girlish eunuch who, having grown up in a brothel, is now both a prostitute and a sort of moral center; more important, Dimple expertly packs the opium pipes that are consumed in Rashid’s den, sucked up by an avid clientele. As time goes on, the cast of characters enlarges: One of particular interest is a Chinese exile, Mr. Lee, who has had a dangerous falling out with a prominent leader back home but wants nothing more than to return there, whether alive or otherwise. As time goes on, too, pipes give way to needles, and the city changes its tenor as the drug diet changes, never for the good. Asks Dimple: “Tell me why Chemical is freely available when there are no tomatoes in the market.” The answer: “Because...the city belongs to the politicians and the crooks and some of the politicians are more crooked than the most crooked of the crooks.” Few come into that dark corner of the world willingly, Thayil lets us know, and few ever leave.

Lyrical, poignant and pensive; challenging for its abundant Indian-isms (“She told only one girak that she was leaving, a pocket maar who always smoked at her station.”) but also for its moral bleakness.

Pub Date: April 12, 2012

ISBN: 978-1-59420-330-5

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Penguin Press

Review Posted Online: Oct. 15, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2012

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD

by Harper Lee ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 11, 1960

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A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.

Pub Date: July 11, 1960

ISBN: 0060935464

Page Count: 323

Publisher: Lippincott

Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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LONESOME DOVE

A NOVEL (SIMON & SCHUSTER CLASSICS)

by Larry McMurtry ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 1985

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This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.