At 370 pages, Rao is on the short side for a multigenerational family saga and sweeping social epic ... Rao might appear at first like a welterweight among heavies. Don’t be fooled ... Vara...is a minimalist’s maximalist, leavening lushness of language with economy of execution ... The novel makes rapid shifts between registers of rhetoric and modes of attention, and it moves just as deftly between timelines ... Information-dense microhistories of industry and culture...are folded into scenes of achingly intimate sensory detail ... How to mediate between the competing interests of autonomy and collectivity, the desire for self-sovereignty and the reality of interdependence, is the major question this novel poses, over and over, at familial, societal and global scale ... The Immortal King Rao is a monumental achievement: beautiful and brilliant, heartbreaking and wise, but also pitiless, which may be controversial to list among its virtues but is in fact essential to its success. Vara respects her reader and herself too much to yield to the temptation to console us. How rare these days as a reader — and how bracing, in the finest way — to encounter a novel that refuses to treat you like a child or a studio audience. If that were the only thing to love about Rao, it would probably be enough. But as I’ve said, there’s also everything else.
At its heart, Vauhini Vara’s twisty, thoughtful debut novel, The Immortal King Rao, is a fascinating alternate history and eerily plausible imagined future of the internet—and the tech corporations that have shaped it. With a sureness to her prose and a sharp eye for the tiny details that shape human lives, Vara combines three distinct storylines into a genre-bending, kaleidoscopic spiral of a tale ... an intimate character study, offering an unflinching, close-up look at the complicated bonds of families ... There are no simple relationships in this book, and few moral absolutes ... Satirical and heartbreaking, packed with historical detail and flawless dystopian world building, The Immortal King Rao is a striking multigenerational epic that tackles—and offers a surprising answer to—that age-old question: What are we here for?
... thrilling ... Vara has penned a dynamic and haunting world ... Vara deftly paints Rao, who lives for more than a century, as an eccentric genius whose childhood memories shape his entrepreneurial spirit ... At its heart, The Immortal King Rao is a jarring and meticulous critique of how progress is often confused with goodness.
Vara...sings a song all her own in a premonitory, daring book that lands somewhere between speculative fiction and bildungsroman, storytelling and fortune-telling ... The novel flashes through time and space with an agile clarity from before King’s birth to grown-up Athena’s present day. Yet Vara has not exactly made this book an easy read ... Perhaps it makes sense that some of the most trenchant work on the shortcomings of technotopia is written by women. Outnumbered in the industry, women drawn to the tech ecosystem can find an outsider’s position from which to make sense of its overlords ... The Immortal King Rao too thrums with a pulse.
... not solely an economic parable. Its emotional core lies in its fraught father-daughter relationship ... The legacy of the East India Company is that capitalism and colonialism are intertwined, that it may be impossible to fully disentangle them. In The Immortal King Rao, the knot only ever grows tighter.
... breaks free of the victim/villain dichotomy. In King Rao, [Vara] creates a Dalit character rooted not in immediate surroundings of caste hierarchies in India but in global contemporary concerns around power, big tech, privatization of the commons, and global warming. The result is a rags-to-riches, from-India-to-the-US story with a difference. King’s success is not personal but God-like thanks to the techno-corporate power he wields. The message echoes analyses of contemporary usurpations of governance by tech moguls of the world: if power corrupts, technological power corrupts absolutely ... sarcastic statements, matter-of-fact in tone—keep the novel anchored as the story keeps switching its focus ... such commentary aside does not always cohere with the many other elements that Vara wants to highlight in the story. The issues of caste, comments on Indian society, and Indian brain drain to the US can seem incidental and only loosely attached to the exigencies of plot. It is not is entirely clear why King need be a Dalit—injustice and oppression in upbringing can arise from many sources—and despite her critique of big tech and placement of a low-caste Indian at its centre, the novel passes over the current (and occasionally vitriolic) about caste-based discrimination in American tech companies. The representation of Indian society here can seem more a plot device in a book primarily for Western readers. The story and its lessons about technology and ambition that run amok don’t really need either India or caste ... may therefore be trying to do too much. But its premise of the blending of roots in poverty and oppression with the evil nature of power and placing this in the context of modern tech, has much promise.
... not a neat allegory of environmental racism or the corrupting influence of power. However, it nevertheless insists that we pay attention to relationships between seemingly diverse commodities (coconuts on the one hand, computers on the other), and how difficult it is to wrench them from systems bent on extracting their value. Moreover, Vara adeptly threads her story with a complicated — and never saccharine — story of love; between father and daughter, husband and wife, and, significantly, a coalition of renegades who dream that another kind of life is possible. At just under 400 pages, The Immortal King Rao’s expansive reach might feel a little constrained by its length. Or, perhaps, it deftly mirrors the turbulence of its narrator’s mind. Athena, after all, isn’t only faced with the task of digesting her father’s entire conscious experience — she is up against a history of extraction so wide-reaching that it is almost impossible to know where to begin. But this is the story that, from her prison cell, she has to try her best to tell, in hopes that it might lead to her (and, maybe, humanity’s) salvation.
Despite the radical implications of her narrator’s cognitive enhancement... Vara never really uses it as anything other than a means of advancing her narrative ... Vara’s Athena, despite her divine appellation and her superhuman enhancements, writes like a mortal with an MFA ... The novel obeys, in this sense, an algorithmic logic of tragedy, but is ultimately too schematic, and too overburdened with the complex mechanics of its own plot, to deliver any kind of catharsis.
Alternating between Rao’s childhood in a small Indian village, his early student days in the U.S., and the dystopian society in which Athena has to function, Vara’s original debut delivers challenging and weighty themes with a sure hand.
Potent ... Throughout, Vara ingeniously identifies portentous links between history and the book’s present, such as the parallel Athena draws between the rise and fall of the East India Company with the Shareholder government run by her father. And with King “cursed” at birth, Vara succeeds at making her family portrait the stuff of myth. This is not to be missed.
...in Vara’s boldly reimagined history, he’s made to embody all such immigrant dreamers, inventing a computer, software, and social network that ultimately dominate the world with an algorithm-run Shareholder Government ... Vara’s strengths are in her clever wordplay and trenchant observations of an algorithm-led dystopia made up of a highly stratified and inequitable population ... Some of Vara’s minor characters are less well drawn, though, and the line between satire and stereotype at times grows thin.
