Rating: 
Summary: well researched but difficult to read
Review: This is the debut novel from Mr. Hari Kunzru. The story is very interesting but looks far fetched. The settings are very realistic and shows immense research Mr. Kunzru must have undertaken.I felt a big relief Mr. Kunzru has interspersed comic twists in an otherwise tragic tale. What I do not understand is the unusual words he had used so often. After I completed the book a few friends read it whose first language is English and they report they had to refer to the dictionary, occasionally not finding a word even in a contemporary English Language Dictionary. Deliberate use of unusual words takes away the pleasure out of casual reading. I think Mr. Kunzru could use everyday words and still could convey exactly what he meant to convey. I am looking forward to his next book where he will avoid this style, though it looks scholarly upon him.
In summary I would say- an interesting story, realistic settings and reasonably good language. Though not exactly a page turner, not at all a boring book.
Rating:
Summary: The Flawed Overambitious Debut of a Promising Talent
Review: This sprawling debut novel ambitiously attempts to combine satire and farce with questions of identity, class, race, culture and heritage in the symbol-laden Dickensian story of an Anglo-Indian boy born just after the turn of the century in British India. Pran is conceived in the midst of a Biblical flood and spends the early years of his life living the spoiled luxurious life of a wealthy child. When he is cast out as a young teenager, he is forced to adapt to circumstances in order to survive- a pattern that will define his life. Throughout the book Pran has no point of view of his own, and grows up learning how to copy the speech, mannerisms, and beliefs of others. It's an interesting idea, but ultimately one that undermines the narrative, since the result is an essentially a soulless creation who has no depth.Through his semi-picaresque adventures, Pran does manage to occasionally engender some sympathy, especially when he is tricked and drugged into sexual slavery. However, Kunzru holds back a bit here, preferring to "draw the veil" over Pran's several rapes, rather than exposing the true horror of the experience, and so a distance is maintained. Pran then lands in the grasp of a self-loathing British Major with a prediction for young boys (a rather stereotyped character), who begins the process of Pran's transformation into a proper British schoolboy. Next he pops up in Bombay's red-light district of Falkland Road as an assistant to the preacher at the Independent Scottish Mission Among the Heathen. This is perhaps the strongest portion of the book, with evocative descriptions of street life and the unhappy Scottish missionary couple he lives with. As the anti-colonial movement grows more active, Pran is presented with a golden opportunity to escape to England. The last third of the book concerns Pran's adventures in England, where he is constantly on thin ice as he tries to pass as English while at Oxford. Here, the book trods rather familiar paths in its satirical savagings of the British elite and notions of class and empire. The book's density overwhelms in this section, as Kunzru crams in a subplot about Pran's Jewish roommate, anti-Semitic riots in London, and his obviously doomed romance with an English girl. The final chapters, in which he travels to Africa on an anthropological expedition and stares into the face of colonial expansion, while an appropriate ending, are far too indebted to Conrad to be considered original. Ultimately, the book rambles about fairly satisfactorily in attempting to wrestle with notions of identity. If nothing else, it sheds light on the discrimination suffered by mixed race children of the British Empire, who were often rejected by both sides. Pran's ultimate goal is to be accepted as British, but once that occurs, he's not sure what to do next, or even why he was striving for that in the first place. The problem with the book is that the reader recognizes this flaw in his quest from the beginning, and therefore the journey has to be pretty entertaining to keep one reading to the inexorable conclusion. Kunzru partially accomplishes this, often through digressions into history, science, and biographies of minor characters. These are all quite interesting in and of themselves, however the book does tend to bog down at times as a result of overwriting.
Rating:
Summary: Good, but not a must read
Review: Unexpectedly, I found Kunzru's book to be very funny. Full of dark satire. At times the humor reminded me of Catch-22, though I've heard that the style is also very similar to Salman Rushdie's work (which I've never read). The problem was that the main character truly never engaged me as a reader. This seemed partially deliberate on the author's part, because the main character was supposed to be a cipher, a man without an identity. But it also seemed partially due to the fact that the author's ambition for the novel raced slightly ahead of his ability to follow-through on that ambition. Actually, the book might have worked far better if it had just been broken down into a series of short stories about different characters. The author's insistence that the main character was a shapeshifter seemed more like an excuse to force these different stories together than a true description of the inner conflict facing a fully-thought-out character. What saved the book was its unexpected humor.
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