Rating: 
Summary: Gripping Reading
Review: Excellent book. Good Pace just like his previous book Impressionist. i am looking forward to his next novel. Way to go Hari !!
Rating: 
Summary: Great Fun, Great Satire
Review: Hari Kunzru's Transmission is a terrifically funny satire about a computer virus, its creator and the lives it touches. Kunzru pokes fun at contemporary British and American culture, taking many stereotypes and running with them. Arjun, a young Indian man, comes to California with dreams of making it big in the computer industry, but reality doesn't make it near his dreams. He ultimately lands a job and things work out for him for a while, but eventually his situation leads him to make a desperate act that changes everything. Arjun's story is funny and entertaining, but also a bit sad. Kunzru thankfully never takes anything too seriously and has apparently quite a bit of fun poking fun at contemporary society. The novel sails along, flashing occasional comic brilliance every couple of pages. Transmission is an entertaing novel, fun to ready, funny to contemplate. Enjoy.
Rating:
Summary: Beware Compu Geeks
Review: I missed out the read of Hari Kunzru's debut 'The Impressionist' but managed to catch up the TV Interview of Hari and grabbed the copy of 'Transmission' - a weave into cyberyarn with combination of reality and virtuality. Transmission manages to charm the reader with its lucid wit of words, which is a vivid tale of the twin forces mutating the 21st century world of globalization and information technology. Kunzru, a perfect story teller's 'Transmission' is a story about men and women tossed around by global forces that are beyond their or for that matter, anyone's control or even understanding. The impulse of the new generation is sometimes money, sometimes sex or sometimes epidemic - the story narrates the journey of a computer engineer Arjun Mehta, who has been body-shopped to the US to be a cheap cyber-coolie, lost in an alien culture and finally sacked from software security firm. Quite a real life experience of many computer engineers, indeed. As the characters lead for disaster, salvation and transformation, Hari shows their lives as it is and his empathy is quite obvious. This reveals a deep observant Hari, a former wired correspondent, with lucent writing as he involves the reader with a 384 pages read and up in Top Ten Charts, just with a second release. A must read for day dreaming Indian Computer Geeks who aspires to create wealth in silicon valley, in the most advanced dominant culture. A good 'Free time' read at leisure. * If this is a repeat review, please excuse!
Rating:
Summary: 'Beware' Indian Compu Geeks!
Review: I missed out the read of Hari Kunzru's debut `The Impressionist' but managed to catch up the TV Interview of Hari and grabbed the copy of `Transmission' - a weave into cyberyarn with combination of reality and virtuality. Transmission manages to charm the reader with its lucid wit of words, which is a vivid tale of the twin forces mutating the 21st century world of globalization and information technology. Kunzru, a perfect story teller's `Transmission' is a story about men and women tossed around by global forces that are beyond their or for that matter, anyone's control or even understanding. The impulse of the new generation is sometimes money, sometimes sex or sometimes epidemic - the story narrates the journey of a computer engineer Arjun Mehta, who has been body-shopped to the US to be a cheap cyber-coolie, lost in an alien culture and finally sacked from software security firm. Quite a real life experience of many computer engineers, indeed. As the characters lead for disaster, salvation and transformation, Hari shows their lives as it is and his empathy is quite obvious. This reveals a deep observant Hari, a former wired correspondent, with lucent writing as he involves the reader with a 384 pages read and up in Top Ten Charts, just with a second release. A must read for day dreaming Indian Computer Geeks who aspires to create wealth in silicon valley, in the most advanced dominant culture. A good 'Free time' read at leisure.
Rating:
Summary: rabelasian odyssey
Review: Indo-Brit lit has generated quite a pedigree in the past few decades, and Kunzru's book can sustain comparison to the other stalwarts of the genre like Rushdie, Seth, and Sulari. Like Rushdie and Seth, Kunzru's novel performs a rabelasian celebration of language as part of its exploration of a world of cultural elisions that presents a world that isn't quite multicultural or hybridized in a symplistic way.
Although the novel powers its way through three or four foci in diverse parts of "The West", few of the characters interact. In other words, he straddles the line between rushing through or underwriting his work and rendering satisfying or completely rounded figures. To his credit, I left the novel admiring both his skill in concision and, paradoxically, the richness of his imagination. Moreover, his work is powered by the apt description that cleverly crystalizes his subjects both visually and temperamentally. The book is playful, true to our times, and sniffing after more than merely the contemporary.
Rating:
Summary: Brilliant
Review: One of the best books I have read in some time, Hari Kunzru's newest novel combines the best of Michael Crichton, Neal Stephenson, and Jhumpa Lahiri all into 278 tautly written pages. His sympathetic protagonist Arjun Mehta is recognizable to anyone with Asian roots; his satirical portrayal of our shrinking, interlinked world recognizable to all. I was sucked in by the stylistic prose and the deftly paced, rollicking narrative. The only negative? It was much too short.
Rating:
Summary: Art of Distraction, a Slice of Life in the Modern Global Vil
Review: The Art of Distraction, a Slice of Life in the Modern Global Village
Transmission by Hari Kunzru p. 276
Transmission is writing which is painfully reflective of our times. With characters more interesting than the plot, there is the marked desperation of some characters and brazen entitlement of others. This fast paced action plays out in front of a backdrop of busy-ness, beauty and pop culture. In his second novel, Mr. Kunzru writes, as a modern techno artist would paint, using crass pink, day-glo orange and then gliding into, and a deep ocean blue. Get ready for a fun ride and a little cheeky humor.
Reminiscent of The Ground Beneath Her Feet, by Salman Rushdie, Transmission is more palatable, more readable, more likely finish-able. The capricious female lead has nowhere near the power of Vina, in The Ground Beneath Her Feet. She's neither as aggravating nor enigmatic. She's not a harbinger of the modern age, not a leader among women... she's not that interesting. Kunzru takes fewer risks with his female characters, avoiding this unknown. He appears at his best skimming the surface. in this novel, with a burnt-out, partied out female American technie, followed by a blond, haute-culture, victim-somebody-save-me, beauty on the Euro front, backed up with the jewel of our male techie's eye, a Bollywood lovely. Our film star, Leela, is vacuous and she is victimized by her power hunger mother, while she is idolized by legions of Desi.
Male characters are Mr. Kunzru's strength. He gives them a lost, boyish almost feminine quality which "works". The lead male is a techie Desi. The story revolves around him and his mistakes. This self deluded lad, the doted upon only son thinks he hits it big after landing a job in American. It's a hard fall, which results in his hitting the bottom of the technology-pool barrel in the Silicon Valley. As luck would have it he's temp-ed out to Seattle. There he is introduced to the bold, bad and burnt out world of techies-on-the-prowl, after work. Herein follows slice after slice of modern life, sandwiched by spicy characters, holds the readers interest. It's a juicy bite.
With repeated references to the Global village, we are taken back and forth across oceans. The pretty, intelligent Indian sister is learning an Aussie accent so that she can work at a call center outside Delhi. The dot.com English guy flies around a lot and eventually crashes and burns. The fair blond maiden with a history of drug problems, issues with men and abandonment tries to strike it out on her own, taking a work assignment covering a Bollywood film set in northern Scotland. She forsakes her dot.com beau and is lured away by a Bollywood bad boy, for the night at least. This continues on until the very last page. The last sentence hold as the story is wrapping it up while leaving it open for a sequel, and room for further imaginations and distractions.
While I read Transmission I felt this book was based on some cultural mythological character, I just didn't know which one. Our techie is bound for a bad kind of greatness, a bumbling-idiot-son-kind of greatness. He has a huge, impact upon the world, and then life goes on.
Mr. Kudzu previously appeared to have had one foot in England and another in India. Now he has grown another extremity, which he extends into American. Thereby deepening his vein of diasporic writing, astute cultural depiction and entertaining storytelling of human delusion and suffering. It's fast, it's furious and it's worth reading.
Rating:
Summary: "Love the brand and stay ahead of the curve"
Review: The dark, exploitative side if immigration, the excesses of global capitalism, and the vulnerable inter-connectedness of our electronic world is at the heart of this madcap, lively, yet often messy book by Hari Kunzru. Transmission is truly worldwide, as Kunzru paints a portrait of twenty-first century life from London to Washington State, from Southern California to India, and from Scotland to Brussels. Arjun Mehta is a shy, bright and idealistic young computer programmer who grows up in stultifying middle-class India and dreams of emigrating to America. With the promise of making lots of money, all Arjun wants is to work and be happy and live a life in magic America. So he flies west, with new visa in his pocket and romance and optimism filling his head.
Upon arrival in America, Arjun tries to make the best of it, but with none of the promised jobs materializing, he gradually becomes more disillusioned. All he sees is the "pumping of low rider cars, grown men wearing short pants like children, pastel lycra dressed men and women, and cars as mythical chariots gleaming with window tint." Arjun finally manages to secure a job outside Seattle, testing anti-virus software for a paranoid numbskull of a boss. While reassuring his parents back in India, that he's on track for early wealth and retirement, he embarks on a harried, half-hearted relationship with Christine, a sexually ambivalent American girl, who works for the company. He takes her to a hackneyed Indian movie and misses the fact that she is bored to tears. But Arjun thinks he has it made, and then with an economic downturn on the horizon, he is shown the door.
In desperation, and in order to try to prevent being fired, he unleashes a killer computer virus that features his favorite Bollywood actress, the seductive Leela Zahir. His intention is to cause minor havoc, and then, when his colleagues are stumped, to ultimately stop it and save his job. Kunzru, logically, thoroughly and systematically details the virus's progress through the global nervous system. But the virus eventually morphs into many headed Leelas and eventually becomes known as Greyday - "and informational disaster, a holocaust of bits," disrupting mobile telephony, airline reservations, transatlantic email traffic, and automated teller machines worldwide.
Arjun's virus brings together two sub-stories: Leela Zahir's new movie, a Bollywood, melodrama, which is shooting in the highlands of Scotland, includes a rather pointless foray into the life of its tortured leading man, whose messy sex life has landed him in the control of a violent, calculating mob boss. The other, far more successful story, involves the English Guy Swift, a greedy, self-serving, cocaine-fueled, smarmy young white-boy capitalist who runs Tomorrow*, a brand consultancy company based in London. With his contracts going sour - partly caused by the Leela virus - and his relationship with his girlfriend, Gabrielle on the skids, he thinks he can redeem himself with one last deal.
Kunzru is a blunt and gusty writer with a verbal agility that lends itself well to this subject matter. The plot takes many twists and turns as the three principal characters get caught up in the cataclysmic contemporary electronic collapse. The author rarely takes a breath and the novel barrels along at a furious rate. Kunzru writes with a minimalist style that draws you in, and also allows him to navigate, what is in essence a complicated tale of capitalist destruction, with skill and ease. Mike Leonard August 04.
Rating: 
Summary: slow great slow
Review: This is the first book I have read from this author. I thought the story line a bit far fetched( but it is a nice yarn), the charachter development needed about 100 more pages. It is an interesting tale of immigration, dreams, the interenet, bollywood, and how small the world is becoming.
Rating:
Summary: slow great slow
Review: This is the first book I have read from this author. I thought the story line a bit far fetched( but it is a nice yarn), the charachter development needed about 100 more pages. It is an interesting tale of immigration, dreams, the interenet, bollywood, and how small the world is becoming.
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