MixedThe Guardian (UK)Saraswati’s unstable blend of realism and allegory ultimately breaks down in the face of its central theme: modern Hindu nationalism ... The very best writers have had difficulty following up a debut collection with a novel ... The disappointments of Saraswati, if anything, reassure for their indication of a willingness to try but fail. Gurnaik Johal is just getting started.
MixedThe Guardian (UK)A Guardian and a Thief dramatises, to superb effect, the Indian elite’s great fear: a world in which they are forced to share. The west’s fear of uncontrolled climate immigration, by contrast, is not only not dramatised but trivialised as the concerns of \'some\'. Those \'other Americans\' will find here a novel to engage their sympathies, but not trouble their sleep.
Mahesh Rao
PositiveThe HinduAs an adaptation of Emma, Polite Society is faithful to the core of the original plot, but not at the expense of its own narrative requirements. Rao never strains for fidelity ... readers familiar with the original will find themselves nodding along with pleasurable recognition. Not that any of this feels stale or predictable: Rao is an exceptionally assured storyteller ... Rao’s method could not be less Austenian. While Austen typically grants psychological depth only to her protagonist, Rao changes perspective freely, with minor characters portrayed just as sympathetically as Ania is. And where the core of her narrative art is individual psychology, and the construction of reality through an individual filter, his style is coolly omniscient, and chiefly interested in the external. Austen’s fiction is notable for its relative lack of sensory detail: Polite Societyis full of vivid, specific images, sounds and smells, given to us by the omniscient narrator. Rao only fleetingly inhabits the individual characters’ minds; as for free indirect style, he abjures it altogether ... There is no broad comedy at the expense of individual characters in Polite Society. This is not, then, a straight adaptation of Emma. Nor is it a conventional account of elite Delhi society.
