“The Association of Small Bombs, is wonderful. It is smart, devastating, unpredictable and enviably adept in its handling of tragedy and its fallout. If you enjoy novels that happily disrupt traditional narratives — about grief, death, violence, politics — I suggest you go out and buy this one.
Some writers are quick to weave common threads; Mahajan delights in letting them fray. His book’s project is not connection but its erosion, and, accordingly, his approach isn’t rote panorama so much as an extended, off-kilter orbit of the void ... Where other authors concede the clash between the West’s physicality and the East’s spiritualism, Mahajan deftly shows how fundamentally reliant each is on the other, and, consequently, how silly the binary truly is.
Mr. Mahajan’s writing is acrid and bracing, tightly packed with dissonant imagery. Development-scarred New Delhi appears 'baked in exquisite concrete shapes.' The survivors of the bombing are seen 'climbing over the corpses with the guilty look of burglars.' The sharpest passages examine the terrorist mind-set and the demented rationales for mass murder with such acid-etched clarity that it’s possible to feel the deadly magnetism of the arguments ... The Association of Small Bombs is not the first novel about the aftermath of a terrorist attack, but it is the finest I’ve read at capturing the seduction and force of the murderous, annihilating illogic that increasingly consumes the globe.
Historical and sociological and political explanations, necessary as they are to making sense of terror, don’t capture the tiny, intimate urgencies that power the life of a person caught in their web. Mahajan can’t explain the grand structures of violence any better than the rest of us can. But he brings us close enough to feel the blast.
Viewed as a whole, The Association of Small Bombs is a thing of loveliness — its structure and concept are a marvel, and the close-up study of Vikas’s grief is quite moving. However, the artful language in an overly plotted larger story emphasizes the grotesque aspects of humanity, tugging the reader between twin poles of delight and disgust without as much exploration of what lies between.
In many ways an accomplished novelist, Mahajan occasionally drives his penchant for arresting imagery off a cliff ... The author only intermittently brings his intelligence and considerable nuance to bear on the social and political currents in which the characters are trapped. Instead, he retreats into the default register of contemporary Indian literary fiction, a discreetly elevated realism devoted to the vicissitudes of life in the middle-class extended family. Mahajan is at his best when he heads out of this comfort zone to explore the ramifications of his assertion that 'a good bombing takes place everywhere at once.' The bomb’s impact is absorbed by the Khuranas, the Ahmeds and the quasi-familial terrorist cell, and too often the impact of the book is absorbed by its focus on family stories, dulled where it ought to be amplified.
By winding us closely into the lives, families, and social networks of the main cast of characters before, in some cases, showing them resorting to horrific crimes or being (if unjustly) charged with terrorism, Mahajan makes the humanity, the psychological unraveling or misplaced idealism or confusion, of each person in his novel more tangible than any news item ever could.
While the plot's twists and turns sometimes feel more author-imposed than character-derived, Mahajan's small touches — especially his insight into how people react to trauma and loss — are succinct and persuasive ... Majahan has a lot on his mind in The Association of Small Bombs and is sometimes more blunt than canny in the way he explores it. Still, his is a voice well worth heeding.
As the plot wears on, it becomes increasingly clear that The Association of Small Bombs is a kind of moral or message novel about how violence and a lust for violence is common to every group, regardless of race or religion. And, more straightforwardly, that violence and idealism are desperately and inextricably linked, leading to each other cyclically and in unexpected, unforeseeable ways. While I admired Mahajan’s portrayal of a world so different from my own, the resulting novel didn’t land for me as anything other than the elaboration of this relatively self-evident truism.
Throbbing heads, frayed nerves: this residue of violence, a physicality delivered with varying intensity, is the hallmark of the novel, over and above any attempt to plumb its character’s psychologies for cheap empathy. Instead Mahajan adjusts his proximities and ours; if we need to smell and see sweat, we do — his camera can shoot at point-blank range. But it can just as easily go aerial ... the novel represents a cautious step forward in contemporary literature’s negotiation with terror. There might be terrorists here, but Mahajan does not allow them to become agents of the sublime — he does not colonize them. Instead, he simply shows us: 'This is what it felt like to be a bomb.'”
Mahajan has the splinter of ice in his heart that Greene said one needed to write truthfully about tragedy. The novel is cruel in what it notices about us, in what it gets right. It is also brave enough to portray fallible victims and then show sympathy when describing terrorist[s] ... This is a superb novel despite occasional longueurs.
If there was any required reading in the wake of the recent attacks in Beirut, Paris, and Belgium, it would be The Association of Small Bombs. Karan Mahajan follows the haunting shock of a small-scale terrorist attack with intensity and grace. He also explores what most media frenzies won’t: the lives of the people behind the attacks ... [it] is a book that expertly examines pain. It pulses with awareness, collectivism, and feeling. This political novel isn’t heavy handed with theory or propaganda, instead, cuts to the heart of terrorism by getting to know the people whose lives are deeply changed by it.
Mahajan shows his dexterity in these portraits, portraying the lives of fictional characters who feel real and help us empathize with — rather than gloss over — the reality of dealing with these issues on a regular basis ... The last third of the novel becomes overwrought with new, complicated plots and a focus on minor characters who are far less interesting. The emotional resonance so sharply felt in the beginning dulls and fades away.
Although the terrorists in The Association of Small Bombs are well created and interesting, with motivations all grounded in political activism and not radical Islam (as one might expect), it is in the description of their victims that Mahajan truly devastates ... Mahajan’s writing is sensitive and intelligent when he describes Mansoor’s new devoutness and engagement with politics. We are shown that this, arguably like most of what happens in the life of a young person, is more than anything about the friends he connects with and the community he finds.
In his dilations on the victims, perpetrators, and survivors of terrorism in The Association of Small Bombs, he attacks the fortress of conventional wisdom with the radiation of original thought. Nothing short of a tour de force ... Line for line, it is a wry and also a wrenching book, at once a lesson in Indian political culture and a lesson in centripetal force - for however far these characters travel psychologically, they are always tethered to the bomb.
