Extraordinary ... The four sections of the novel, though disparate, bleed into one another in the reader’s mind ... I was in awe of Deb’s imagination and razor-sharp prose ... That the novel invokes a glorious past, hints at a utopian future and contradicts reality could be the author’s way to protest an authoritarian government skilled in just that.
Deb expertly compresses two centuries of India’s history—and its future possibilities—into four sections and a coda ... Abundantly and realistically detailed, yet spiked with fantastical elements from mysterious cellphone messages to a ticktock army, the four main sections are so rich and so freighted with ideas that each could stand alone as its own novel. Linking them serves to create a strong sense of life in India and a sink-into-it read for lovers of big books.
At times, the novel’s hallucinatory and historical qualities can clash, and its malleable reality can make it challenging to parse the finer details of what is happening during certain moments. But that hallucinatory quality makes this novel far more effective than a more buttoned-down narrative style would have.
Ambitious ... There’s little overt connective narrative tissue across the novel’s four sections; Deb is aspiring for the kaleidoscopic, but the overall feel is of loosely related novellas. It’s a visionary novel for sure but not a tight and cohesive one.
An ambitious and phantasmagoric epic ... Like Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the author uses magic realism to shed new light on historical events. Filled with poetic imagery and dialogue, and subtle connections among the stories, this is a novel to get lost in.
