[Mishra's] view of modernism and its promises of global wealth, growth and fulfillment is skeptical, curious and almost uncomfortably piercing. In his new novel, Run and Hide, he sweeps globalization, populism, cultural upheaval and the crisis of modern masculinity into the story of a modernized India ... Colorful ... The novel is deeply Indian, and surely readers like this one who are less familiar with the subtleties of the history, culture and language of that country will miss a lot, despite Mishra’s thrilling specificity and description. But like most things in this 21st century world, the book does not stop at borders ... Mishra’s scenes of life among the modern elites of Delhi, London and New York...are so precise and well-observed they are almost embarrassing ... Mishra is a masterful eyewitness to the modern world, equally unafraid of nuance, earnestness and absurdity. Run and Hide...is not plot-driven. It is a slow, careful book about a fast and reckless world. This is not a destination novel; it is a journey novel. One well worth taking.
Run and Hide’s flashback narrative, which slowly reveals the story, is an impressive feat of craft, and the book rewards a second reading. In some places, its priorities skew toward political commentary rather than the complexity of characters or human relationships, but this is a moving novel that should assure Mishra’s standing as a writer of fiction as well as non-fiction.
The changing forms of [Mishra's] writing, always straining to encompass the chaotic reality Mishra sees around himself, reveal him to be a profoundly literary voice, as interested in how to write about a subject as the subject itself... This epistolary form (in which we never get Alia’s side) is a curious choice. The philosophising tone is reminiscent of 19th-century Russian discourse ... The novel manages to be somewhat plotless, yet unnecessarily convoluted ... But Mishra is having fun with the newfound freedom of fiction, and the reader comes to share in it ... After the density of his recent books, with their weighty bibliographies, Mishra’s fictional prose is permitted, once again, to take lyrical flight.
The first novel in more than 20 years from the essayist and cultural analyst Pankaj Mishra is as sharp, provocative and engagé as you’d expect. An exploration of Narendra Modi’s autocratic, Hindu-nationalist New India seen through the progress of three graduates from the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology, it’s also reassuringly rich in characterisation and the sheer sensory overload of modern life ... As an exuberant chronicle of a late capitalist world fatally mediated by Twitter and Instagram, Run and Hide might be the most zeitgeisty novel you could read. By the end, Arun recalls Hermann Hesse’s non-conformist heroes, his searching insight and principles of social equality assailed but still intact.
[Run and Hide] is concerned with topics such as the new global elite and the tilting of the balance between West and East in favour of India and China, but, though it is unquestionably a novel of ideas – one that should provoke rich and lively argument - it is also, indeed primarily, a novel of character, one that , like so many truly interesting novels, draws from the deep well of nineteenth century fiction ... This is a wonderfully rich and enjoyable novel. It is very much, and disturbingly, of our time, but its strength lies not so much in its examination of political and financial immorality and criminality...as in its attachment to the deep-rooted tradtions of the European novel ...Intellect, observation. memory , sympathy and imagination are all happily here. The novel can be read quickly for sheer pleasure. It is a work for our time and one that will surely be read many years on for what will then be its historical interest. So: a novel built to last.
Mishra might have done well to rein in [his] editorialising tendency, as a bit too much of the novel is taken up with elucidating its gist ... There are some pleasing lines here and there ... Mishra’s narrator is prone to occasional clunky locutions ... This lends a stilted texture to the prose, though it’s arguably a plausible rendering of the hypercorrect diction cultivated by certain aspiring types who are trying too a little hard to sound the part ... The novel’s engagement with masculinity is somewhat limp.
Arun is the only character allowed some degree of complexity ... In Arun, the Buddhist desire to withdraw from the world coexists with a sterile self-absorption, which makes for a fascinating case study, but a wearisome narrator. The novel is robbed of a necessary frisson ... There is much to be admired about Mishra’s willingness to tackle one of contemporary fiction’s ignored themes: class. But his social – and, frankly, moral – indictments come at the expense of a novel’s inherent imaginative promise. It isn’t just the tediously flat characters; the plot, too, is an assortment of soapbox staples, be it the rags-to-riches story of Arun’s friends, or his own poor-boy-meets-rich-girl trajectory. Women are no more than props in this sweeping inventory of male self-aggrandisement. Arun’s mother is stereotypically submissive ... The didacticism of Mishra’s essays, bracing in their clarity, works against him in fiction ... Mishra doesn’t seem to realise the difference between the illuminating and the trivial detail, what to include and what to leave out ... Scenes are introduced as 'agonisingly vivid' before being laid out, objects are overwhelmingly catalogued as 'emblems' before being described. The novel exudes a constant anxiety about being understood: Mishra doesn’t trust the reader to read between the lines ... You’ll find in this book a meticulous exposition of India’s illiberal turn, how the country’s pluralist and quasi-socialist founding principles were betrayed in the past three decades. But the story lacks a subtler feeling for life.
In...early sequences, some of the strongest in the novel, Mishra offers a startling exploration of the grim deal habitually struck in this pillar of Indian education ... It is Alia’s presence, and project, that allow Mishra to bridge the gap between the personal histories of Arun and his friends and the recent history of New India as a whole, and to offer the suggestion that the self-reinvention practised by the characters may have detached the likes of Aseem and Virendra not only from history but also, at some level, from ethical responsibility ... When this connection comes off, the results are both impressive and impressively unsettling; but, as Arun’s memories take us closer to the present, Mishra’s narrative begins to feel less confident in itself ... Mishra seems to become less trusting in the ability of his details to do the talking for him, sly narrative observation making way for clunky expository dialogue ... It is as though Pankaj Mishra felt the need to remind his readers what an important analysis of the psyche of New India Run and Hide is, when the best parts of the novel do that anyway, with so much less fuss and so much more style.
To make the revelations in Arun’s [epistolary] memoir plausibly revelatory to Alia, Mishra has had to render their relationship insubstantial, or at least make Arun and Alia inscrutable to each other. This is a legitimate theme, but here it stems from narrative necessity, which makes the pathos of their relationship’s disintegration underwhelming. Addressing the novel to Alia seems an act of formal self-sabotage, imposing an inverse relation between the substance of the novel and the substance of the romance the novel chronicles: the less Arun shared with Alia in person, the more there is for him to explain now. And explaining is his dominant mode ... If this novel can seem overly freighted with ideas, its characters at risk of congealing into emblematic case studies, Mishra’s narrators can also seem isolated figures against a world-historic ground, individuals temporarily drawn 'in' to society but rarely seeming 'of' it ... It’s as though the rather stringent opposition between engagement and detachment dramatised in the lives of Mishra’s narrators bifurcates his own writing into polemic and introspection, public and inner life, bypassing much of what lies between—social and private life—and so vacating much of fiction’s richest traditional terrain ... Mishra’s narrators are proto-writers, and we are chiefly witness to their writerly reveries, observations, reflections. However acute and riveting, these do not necessarily evoke an autonomous, dynamically individuated personality. First-person narrators naturally monopolise their self-presentation, but Arun’s self-aware, penetrating account of his and his friends’ wayward lives does not elicit the sort of vigilant, ludic attention that readers bring to more devious first-person fiction that allows us to glimpse the intriguing gap between a narrator’s self-portrayal—and self-knowledge—and possible alternative views on their personality or predicament.
There is a great deal of eloquent commentary in this book—on Naipaul, on Modi, on life in rural India and in London literary salons alike. Mr. Mishra, a prolific writer of nonfiction, possesses a rare and intangible quality that you might call personality, which ensures that nothing he publishes will ever be boring (he is like Christopher Hitchens in this regard). But such a voice is not the same thing as literary style, and Run and Hide has little narrative nuance or storytelling guile, the things that typically distinguish works of fiction. Ultimately, Naipaul, whose novels are far more ambiguous than the lessons Aseem takes from them, comes away from the encounter unscathed.
A beautifully written novel that captures the complexities and challenges of growing up in India and the simultaneous struggle to find meaning and a way forward in life.
Challenging ... Portions of the book's latter half feel as if Mishra has elbowed his way into the narrative to comment on the world. Fortunately, those points are thoughtfully argued.
Mishra’s depiction of this deprivation is never voyeuristic, never approaches the poverty porn that such a setting might inspire ... Mishra’s evocation of caste is all the more powerful for its sensitivity, for its never being fully explained ... The portion of the book set in London also shows some of its weaknesses ... But the dialogue as a whole is a more widespread and serious problem. Oh, the dialogue! It confounds and frustrates and brutally derails the narrative.
Circuitous ... Arun’s reflections are nearly sunk by tedious philosophizing about India’s place in the early 21st century and the rise of nationalism, but are saved by the searing portraits of purportedly successful Desis. There are plenty of insights, but the rambling structure and navel-gazing narration will tax readers’ patience.
