Auspicious ... Rege captures his contradictions—his rough passion and his eloquence, his dreams, his insecurities and crude bigotries—with a cool dispassion that exemplifies her fully realized characterizations ... If one had a quibble with Quarterlife, it would be that the debating is so extensive that it sometimes overwhelms the scene-setting ... The scope of the book’s ideas and the textured rendering of its characters contribute an oceanic feeling of simultaneous scale and intimacy.
A fearless achievement in multifarious listening ... An urgent, vital orchestration ... One of the novel’s achievements is its commitment to patience, to a wise narrative gradualism ... A rich, allusive, sometimes demanding novel.
A colorful, panoramic portrait of life in contemporary India, the literary equivalent of a colorful, bustling Diego Rivera mural ... Devika Rege has created fascinating leading characters whose identity crises are set against a country going through its own identity crisis.
Given the political and social turmoil in the country, this novel is vital, a marker of an important moment in its storied history as Rege expertly captures the zeitgeist of the new India.
An ambitious, unusual, formally risky novel ... Overstuffed, yes, occasionally bewildering, yes—but a lot of that reflects, persuasively, the author’s sense of India’s exciting, fractious, sometimes dangerous profusion of factions and energies. A promising first outing by a skilled writer.
