Narcopolis by Jeet Thayil
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
This book takes the dirty, desolate, destructive lives of addicts, turns them on their head, spins them around,and spits them back at you in repeatedly surprising ways. How do you make a story about opium/heroin dens in Bombay more decrepit? Make your lead character a non-willing trans-gender eunuch who is forced by her boss to take on an alternate Muslim identity. If that wasn’t intriguing enough, Thayil has many more surprising detours along the way.
There are no lulls in this story, none! At every moment in which a particular storyline has been developed and nearly played out, you are slapped rather hard with tangents as abrasive as anal sex, body cavity drug smuggling, Chinese Cultural Revolution purges, and multiple murders. All of this with a backdrop of racial rioting, slum life, and the persistent rains of the monsoon. This book, though it failed short of turning me into an opium addict, will make you yearn for a life a little less serene, more dirty, more seedy, more direct, and one unfiltered by modern business, media, and the cult of modernity.