The Ministry of Utmost Happiness: A novel

Wonderful storyteller telling a wonderful story. Just when I thought I could not read a better book set in India and Kashmir, along comes Ms. Roy and blows me away with another wonderful tale set in that exotic, mysterious place. Thank you Ms. Roy.

This is the kind of book that you dread having to put down after you have read it. Or the kind where you return to the first page to reread . Roy still preserves her wry, intimate and sometimes cruel narrative voice from her "God of Small Things" days. Whether it is the idyllic backwaters of Aymanam or the slums of old Delhi, Roy can transport her readers to the novel's settings. A truly delicious read that will cast a spell on you, even if that spell is occasionally broken by her political preaching and barely suppressed leftist outrage.

In her characteristic society-ripping critique, Arundhati Roy exposes every nastiness directed at every oppressed group within a country that's nothing if not complicated.

This is utterly brilliant writing, that lays bare India's bureaucracy and mini-despots at the same time sharing its richness and beauty. Soak it up.

Ok, yeah, it gets kind of weird in the middle, but she pulls it all together. Don't expect a traditional novel. It is not. It is poetry and philosophy. She is still one of the very best authors and I highly recommend this book. It is a little hard to follow because there are so many characters, but it is still an excellent read. Poetry in a novel.

"One day Kashmir will make India destruct in the same way. You may have blinded all of us, everyone of us, with your pellet guns by then. But you will still have eyes to see what you have done to us. You are not destroying us. You are constructing us. Its yourselves that you are destroying. Khuda Hafiz Garson bhai.

With that he left. I never saw him again."

Brilliant writer and brilliant activist.. I like her very much... but what comes out as a book here is a half cry and half plea.
In this book I do feel the impotence that you experience in a nightmare where you are being chased by a snake and cannot outrun or you want to scream but cant. Arundhati Roy does a good job of painting this emotion. The idea of telling a shattered story by "not becoming everybody but becoming everything" can be mesmerizing... but only if it is told right..

Here is the story of Gujrat, Kashmir and Naxals and the tyranny of Indian state... I feel Arundhati Roy is trying to yell out loud and show the world something she knows is true and we all need to open our eyes to reality, but what she manages is a half cry and half plea ... she tried too hard and what came out was a hodge podge of a novel.. akwardly put together.

There were times when even Sachin Tendulkar got out on 0. Sometimes its a miss, sometimes one tries too hard and sometimes we fail !!!
But not to worry, we will wait for your next book !!

I had high hopes for this work, which promised to marry Roy's literary skill with her political activism, but I was disappointed.

For the first half--Anjum's story--I kept waiting for the story to deepen into something meaningful, but it never did. While there is some beautiful prose in this half of the book, it felt like Roy was trying too hard without adding anything new to the conversation. Anjum's struggles as an intersex woman assigned male at birth seemed like Roy was trying too hard to be trendy, while the boy who called himself Saddam Hussein (as well as the obscene street language) felt like an attempt to be edgy. Saddam was the character I found most intriguing, but he was introduced to be immediately discarded to a background character, while Anjum suffered a traumatic event but the repercussions and her recovery happen almost entirely off screen.

When the second half started, I hoped that the disjointed way of telling Tilo's story and weaving it into Anjum's would amount to something, but it never did. I appreciated that Roy did not graphically describe the atrocities in Kashmir, but her hands-off, ironic storytelling in this half of the book didn't work either--other artists have pointed out the same absurdities and tragedies in other contexts in much more original and powerful ways.

In the end, the story boiled down to a group of outcasts coming together to form their own family in the background of modern day India, but that analogy was too heavy handed and never developed into something more complex and worthy of the too many pages it took to unspin Roy's half-realized story.

Thanks to NetGalley and Hamish Hamilton (and imprint of Penguin Random House, UK) for providing me with an ARC copy of this novel that I freely chose to review.
This is not an easy novel to review. So far I’ve found that with all the novels longlisted for the Man Booker Prize that I’ve read so far. They all seem to defy easy categorisation.
I know the author’s first novel has many admirers and I always felt curious when I saw it (be it at the bookshop or the library) but as it was also a long novel I kept leaving it until I had more time. That was one of the reasons why I picked up this novel when I saw it on NetGalley. I thought it would be a good chance to read one of the author’s works (and I know she’s published more non-fiction than fiction), and I must admit I loved the title and the cover too.
As a starting point, I thought I’d share some of the fragments I highlighted as I read. Some because of the ideas expressed (that made me pause and think), some because of the author’s powers of description, some because they were funny, some beautiful…
I’m not Anjum, I’m Anjuman. I’m a mehfil, I’m a gathering. Of everybody and nobody, of everything and nothing. Is there anyone else you would like to invite? Everybody is invited. (This one I added at the end, when I reread the first chapter, that had intrigued me but at the time wasn’t sure exactly of who was narrating the story, or even if it was a who, a what, a ghost, a tree…)
And she learned from experience that Need was a warehouse that could accommodate a considerable amount of cruelty.
Then came Partition. God’s carotid burst open on the new border between India and Pakistan and a million people died of hatred.
Saddam had a quick smile and eyelashes that looked as though they had worked out in a gym.
He spoke like a marionette. Only his lower jaw moved. Nothing else did. His bushy white eyebrows looked as though they were attached to his spectacles and not his face.
…a mustache as broad as the wingspan of a baby albatross…
When the sun grew hot, they returned indoors where they continued to float through their lives like a pair of astronauts, defying gravity, limited only by the outer walls of their fuchsia spaceship with its pale pistachio door.
Normality in our part of the world is a bit like a boiled egg: its humdrum surface conceals at its heart a yolk of egregious violence.
She walked through miles of city waste, a bright landfill of compacted plastic bags with an army of ragged children picking through it. The sky was a dark swirl of ravens and kites competing with the children, pigs and packs of dogs for the spoils.
These days in Kashmir, you can be killed for surviving.
In Kashmir when we wake up and say ‘Good Morning’ what we really mean is ‘Good Mourning’.
I think the first quotation (and one I mention later on), in some way, sum up the method of the novel. Yes, it is the story of Anjum, a transgender (well, actually intersex) Muslim woman from India who, from a very young age, decides to live her life her own way. She joins a group of transgender women (who’ve come from different places, some who’ve undergone operations and some not, some Christian, some Hindus, some Muslim, some young and some old…) but at some point life there becomes impossible for her and she takes her things and ends up living in a cemetery. Although she starts by sleeping between the tombs, eventually, with a little help from her friends, ends up building up a semblance of a house (that incorporates a grave or two in each room), where she offers room and boarding to people who also feel they don’t belong anywhere else. Her business expands to include offering burials to people rejected by the official church. But the story (yes, I know it sounds weird enough with what I’ve said) is not only Anjum’s story, the story of her childhood, her struggles, her desire to be a mother at any price, but also the story of many others. People from different casts, religions, regions, with different political alliances, professions, interests, beliefs… The story, told in the third person, also incorporates poems, articles, entries from a peculiar dictionary, songs, slogans, pamphlets, in English, Urdu, Kashmiri… The telling of the story is fragmented and to add to the confusion of characters, whose connection to the story is not clear at first, some of them take on different identities and are called by different names (and many difficult to differentiate if one is not conversant with the names typical of the different regions of India and Pakistan). Although most of the entries in other languages are translated into English, not all of them are (I must clarify I read an ARC copy, so it is possible that there have been some minor changes in the definite version, although from the reviews I’ve read they do not seem to be major if any at all), and I clearly understand why some people would find the reading experience frustrating. All of the fragments of stories were interesting in their own right, although at times I felt as if the novel was a patchwork quilt whose design hid a secret message I was missing because I did not have the necessary key to interpret the patterns.
The settings are brought to life by a mixture of lyricism, precise description, and an eye and an ear for the rhythms and the ebbs and flows of the seasons, the towns, and the populations; the characters are believable in their uniqueness, and also representative of all humanity, observed in minute detail, and somewhat easy to relate to, even though many of them might have very little to do with us and our everyday lives. But their love of taking action and of telling stories is universal.
There is a lot of content that is highly political about the situation in Kashmir, religious confrontations in India, conflicts in different regions, violence, corruption, class and caste issues, gender issues, much of it that seem to present the same arguments from different angles (all of the people who end up sharing Anjum’s peculiar abode are victims of the situation, be it due to their gender, their caste, their religion, their political opinions, and sometimes because of a combination of several of them) and I read quite a few reviews that suggested the novel would benefit from tougher editing. I am sure the novel would be much easier to read if it was thinned down, although I suspect that’s not what the author had in mind when she wrote it.
This is a challenging and ambitious novel that creates a kaleidoscopic image of India, an India made up of marginal characters, but perhaps truer than the “edited” versions we see in mass media. I have no expertise in the history or politics of the region so I cannot comment on how accurate it is, but the superficially chaotic feeling of the novel brings to mind the massive contrasts between rich and poor in the country and the pure mass of people that make up such a complex region. Although stylistically it is reminiscent of postmodern texts (made up of fragments of other things), rather than creating a surface devoid of meaning to challenge meaning’s own existence, if anything, this novel’s contents and its meaning exceed its bounds. The method of the novel is, perhaps, encapsulated in this sentence, towards the end of the book, supposedly a poem written by one of the characters: How to tell a shattered story? By slowing becoming everybody. No. By slowly becoming everything.
As I’ve written many times in my reviews, this is another book that I would not recommend to everybody. Yes, there are plenty of stories, some that even have an end, but it is not a book easy to classify, nor a genre book. There is romance, there are plenty of stories, there is poetry, there is politics, history, war, violence, prejudice, friendship, family relationships, but those are only aspects of the total. And, beautiful as the book is, it is not an easy read, with different languages, complex names, unfamiliar words, different styles and a fragmented structure. As I have not read Roy’s previous novel, I don’t dare to recommend it to readers who enjoyed her first novel, The God of Small Things. From the reviews I’ve read, some people who liked the first one have also enjoyed this one, but many readers have been very disappointed and have given up without reading the whole book. I’d say this is a book for people who like a challenge, who are interested in India from an insider’s perspective, don’t mind large doses of politics in their novels, and have the patience to read novels that are not page-turners full of twist and turns only intent on grabbing the readers’ attention at whatever cost. Check the book sample, read other reviews too and see if you’re up to the challenge. I know this is a novel that will stay with me for a very long time.

I tried to read this book, and failed. Whatever plot there may be is hard to detect in the expluteration of descriptions, asides, excursions, political situations, extraneous commentary, and chaos that the author describes. I got through the part about Argnun, the hermaphrodite, and started the part about the second protagonist. Failing to see the significance of these two narratives in the mishmash, I gave up. Does the author have ADD by any chance?

The God of Small Things is one of my favorite novels of all time. I'm a teacher who includes it in my syllabus, so I re-read it annually. With every reading, my students and I discover new compelling details, new layers of meaning. It is political, but it never proselytizes. At its core, it is a what-if love story about how the big ugly currents of bigotry can destroy the small, meaningful pieces of our humanity. It is a masterful text.

I was so excited to learn that Arundhati Roy was publishing another novel. And I was so disappointed by this text. I am giving it 3 stars instead of 1 because I think the author accomplishes her mission. Roy is deeply politicized, her essays are strictly political, and this is an overtly political novel. This novel was meant to bring light to the bigotries and hypocrisies of Indian government, and it is very successful at doing so. Unfortunately, it is overbearing and heavy-handed that the story gets overpowered by the message. The pages and pages of description of torture in Kashmir, for example, are tediously horrifying. The most interesting character in the novel is the hijra Anjum, and she is discarded to become little more than an accessory to Roy's sermonizing about the government's misconduct.

Additionally, Roy needs to stop making herself the heroine of her novels. It was one thing to see the parallels between Roy's own life and that of Rahel's in The God of Small Things. Tilo-as-Roy in this novel is an entirely one-dimensional heroine whose relationship with Musa lacks the complexity and passion of the relationships in Roy's other novel. In the end, she comes off as nothing more than a self-aggrandizing vanity.

Arundhati Roy's first novel in many years is an epic history of India and its recent history. It starts around fifty years in the past and follows the story of Anjum. Anjum is born with the organs of both sexes and after finding disapproval in society, moves in with a group of the Hijra, transsexuals who are in the midst of gender reassignment. She leaves this group after many years and moves to a graveyard where she collects a group of others whom society would call misfits.

The story then leaps ahead to the conflict in Kashmir and the struggle between India to subdue it into a peaceful territory and the freedom fighters or terrorists depending on viewpoint, who continue the struggle. The story is viewed though the life of Tilo and the men who loved her. There is Naga, the journalist who marries Tilo after rescuing her from an interrogation center. The is the Indian bureaucrat known as Garson Hobart who is influential enough that when he sends Naga to free Tilo his power insures it is done. Then there is Musa, the gentle man who becomes known as a successful Kashimi terrorist after his wife and child are murdered.

Each of the characters has a history of pain and struggle yet each finds a way to make a life and to treasure the small moments that are all one can expect to keep. Along the way the reader is introduced to a host of other memorable characters each of whom's story is told in a way that makes their broken lives understandable. This is a book of terror and struggle yet of hope and love also. This book is recommended for readers of literary fiction.

BOOK REVIEW
The Ministry of Utmost Happiness by Arundhati Roy, Hamish Hamilton, Penguin Random House, UK, 2017.
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Reviewer: Robin Chowdhury

This novel from Arundhati Roy follows two decades after her first book which was awarded the Booker prize in 1997. This is a more ambitious book and ,therefore, a risky undertaking since it attempts to tell some isolated stories in a limited geographical and cultural context while trying to invoke politics and society in contemporary India in all its complexity.

The individual stories create initial interest in the reader but the overall narrative is disjointed and chaotic. The book is unable to capture the energy and dynamism of contemporary India because the mainstream is ignored and the emphasis is on the negative consequences of political, social and economic progress. No fresh insight or new perspective is offered on the advances and failures of this hugely successful democracy.
Three separate strands or stories can be identified. The first strand relates to a community of Hijras (transgender people) living in the Khwabgah (House of Dreams). A boy Aftab joins in the Khwabgah and transitions as a female, Anjum, one of the main characters in this novel. Later she starts living in a graveyard and much of the action shifts to that location which evolves into a happy world for this small community.
A second theme is a love story starting at a college in New Delhi, where three boys fall in love with one girl (Tilo or Tilottama) . The three boys are from different parts of the country and have privileged backgrounds. One of them, Musa hails from Kashmir valley and gets deeply involved with militant Kashmiri separatists. He is portrayed as the true love of the girl although she marries Naga (Nagaraj Hariharan),later separating . Tilo has several trips to Kashmir for meetings with Musa and brushes with the security forces. The other two boys get involved during key events affecting Musa and Tilo. Interestingly, Tilo ends up happily in the Khwabgah.

A third strand of the book concerns this separatist political movement in Kashmir valley and the narrative often transitions from literature to partisan political propaganda.
The three strands are woven together with reference political events in different parts of the country over several decades which are meant to provide a link to the back-stories of the main characters but which make the whole a chaotic and patchwork narrative. The characters are shallow and situations appear contrived.
These events include acts of terror, incidents of communal violence and incursions of terrorists across the line of control/border in Kashmir. There is not even a mention of the most audacious, Pakistan-inspired, terrorist attacks such as that on the Indian Parliament and the devastating attacks in Mumbai in which hundreds of Indians and foreigners perished.

The coverage of self-governance in Kashmir is poor and unbalanced and references to the operations of police and other security personnel are biased .These sections can be regarded as amateurish journalism rather than a literary contribution.

The mindset of the author is obvious in sections which mock at the emergence of India as a vibrant power , as ,for example , on page 96-97:
“ ….It was the summer Grandma became a whore. She was to become the super capital of the world’s favourite new superpower. India! India! The chant had gone up-on TV shows, on music videos, in foreign newspapers and magazines, at business conferences and weapons fairs, at economic conclaves and environmental summits, at book festivals and beauty contests. India! India! India!’

The only nods to culture are the use, on the one hand, of Urdu dialect and invective and, on the other hand, Urdu poetry, a throwback to a romantic and decadent era of the not-too-distant past (dutifully translated by the author)
Editorializing reaches a low point where the author descends to thinly-veiled, partisan slanders. Even fans of the author are likely to consider this as unacceptable in a book posing as a contribution to literary fiction.

This is the second book that I can recall putting down without finishing it, and the only book I've ever given a one-star review to. I listen to round 150 audiobooks per year, and use the New York Times reviews as a source for finding new authors to read. I'm no stranger to drawn-out, complicated novels with unappealing characters, but found the progress of this book to be intolerable after the plot completely vanished about a third of the way in. Worst editing I've ever seen - the unrelated, excruciatingly character vignettes made the story challenging to follow, with no reward for sticking with it. Ugh - this book might have been better broken up into separate volumes, one with the main story, and another with short stories. This author does not have Isabel Allende's gift for seamlessly weaving grim plotlines of gov't atrocities into a compelling, palatable story: it feels like Roy is trying to narrate every possible example of horrible human behavior to shove it down our throats, but without doing the work to make it into a story. It's like presenting someone with a pile of flour, sugar, and eggs instead of a baked cake. I haven't been this repulsed by a book since I abandoned a David Foster Wallace book without finishing it.

The Ministry is a unique, important and yet deeply flawed and disturbing novel. Overall, the book is less about its story and more about the indirect messages it has. And there too, it scores far less than what the author possibly intended.

Almost every story we read is about people who have some wins somewhere. However, this is a book about those who have almost none. There are numerous around the world who do not have almost any of the proverbial silver linings as they wade through their lives. These, our world's most deprived, need master storytellers like Arundhati Roy to expose their plights. The result is necessarily a tale that is relentlessly grim. The author makes no attempts, consciously and justifiably, to lighten the mood almost anywhere. This is not a book for anyone looking for a distraction.

From the pure literary and story-telling viewpoint, the author falls short of the lofty standards attained in her first novel. The back and forth style - whereby the author would announce significant eventual outcomes but would then go back to fill in the details, with multiple embedded waves of these in between - is grating after a while. The book is complex with over a dozen characters having tens of disparate experiences over decades of their lives. The language(s) used, along with the style of storytelling, compound the difficulty in following the tales even before factoring in the unfamiliar backdrops for most readers.

The author's biggest failures are in her inability to remove the personal biases and implying revolutionary solutions that have seldom reduced, let alone removed the problems she is highlighting. The author takes up the cause of minorities of all kind while painting the amorphous majority clan as the chief villain. It is staggering that the author fails to realize that there is no collective majority that imposes its will. Societies that are poor and uneducated have always had many of its less scrupulous elites creating some or the other divisions (along race, sex, religion, language, cast, class or other levels) to serve their own purposes. Solutions to more tolerance are remotely not in state-less, military-less or gun-wielding rebel-led communes.

The book should still be read for the way it exposes what a Eunuch, a low-caste, a Kashmiri or a poor suffers in India. The book should be read to learn how many in command abuse their power. The author should be most commended for taking on such subjects.

Surprised to see the negative reviews, but then this is not a novel that is easily described or even understood. At times I would find myself paging back through earlier sections to try and remember/understand who a particular character was. However, to me this is not a shortcoming - it was as if I was plunged into a world that I had to struggle to make sense of - as if I were a child with adults, or a traveler in a foreign land (one with no Starbucks). Roy goes out of her way to translate (I thought), but also gives the original language quotes of poetry and songs. I was awakened to the everyday textures and characters of cultures and countries that I follow only vaguely on the national news. I absolutely loved every page, even the most heartbreaking and raw episodes. The connections to "Western" writers made clear a kind of desperate spirituality that gave me a frequency to tune to - Jean Genet, and Leonard Cohen! Don't be put off - read this unusual, remarkable, breathtakingly tragic, beautiful story.

The author's writing talent shines through with her razor-sharp portrayal of the motley gathering of the dispossessed and the pretenders gathered to protest or collectively lament (or exploit, as the case may be) the varied and cumulative disasters, natural and circumstantial, of which they happen to be the unfortunate victims of. Those chapters were an entertaining and eye-opening read. As for the rest of the novel...

It's stuffed with more characters than extras in a Bollywood "item" number, and true to its form, changes its gaudy costumes just as frequently. Quite a few handful of instances where acts of animal cruelty are detailed in a detached and gloating manner, I suspect this is a reflection of the author's own oft-vocalized speciesist attitude.

Overall, it was an educational read, but could have been tighter and more focused, required a healthy dose of motivation and intermittent pauses to connect the dots to get through.

Arundhati Roy has written an extensive, absorbing and heart-breaking story of the personal struggle of a transgender person against prejudice and resentment. Set amongst the internal social turmoil of India and the cultural conflict with Pakistan, Roy’s writing is at times wonderfully poetic and often political.

An eagerly awaiting mother praying for the safe delivery of her son Aftab finds on inspection that he has female parts. Her reactions go from horror wanting to kill herself and her child, to lovingly holding him “while she fell through a crack between the world she knew and the worlds she did not know existed.” He was a Hijra, and she kept it hidden from everyone for a long time. But out it would come and eventually Aftab at 15-years-old enters the Khwabgah (a transgender centre) in Delhi, to live amongst the community of Hijras for more than 30 years. Now known as Anjum she has had a botched operation which removed the male parts but she lives with much more freedom.

India and Pakistan, for many outsiders, are technology-focused global powerhouses yet are such tumultuous, divisive and intractable societies. Their ongoing aggressive relationship to each other has caused conflict that has cost the lives of millions, particularly in the Kashmir region. Internally the religious and caste divides are heart-breaking with the brunt being borne by the lower and minority classes. There are multiple tales in the book with the wonderful array of characters, and they touch on the caste system and the endless killings and retribution. Unnecessary death is a given and it journeys through the narration with us - ever present.

Following a traumatic conflict experience, Anjum returns to Khwabgah only to set in motion the construction of a guest house called Jannat (Paradise), on the site of a graveyard. The Ministry of Utmost Happiness guest house will become the home to Hijras and all those unfortunates regardless of race, colour, creed or gender. This will be a safe haven where all can freely express themselves without discrimination. While despair, rejection and abandonment are so prevalent in the novel it is also a story of hope, a story of community caring, and social conscience so you are not alone and unloved. Everything will turn out all right in the end. Because it must. Belief. Love.

I did feel disconnected for large sections of the book and while inspired by the beautiful prose, in the beginning, I wanted to see something more happen, especially in the second half. The book is quite long so perhaps this also added to my angst.

Many thanks to Penguin Books Publishing and NetGalley, for an ARC version of the book in return for an honest review

The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is the first book I've read by Arundhati Roy and it's fair to say that I found it challenging and occasionally bewildering as various threads and themes intertwine. It's vibrant, colourful and every page is packed with incident and rich in detail. In the first instance, I took it at face value and was dawn not a different world. A second reading made more sense of the the numerous underlying themes.

The first section features Anjab, assigned as male at birth but who identifies ultimately as female. She leaves a Muslim home to live with other transgender individuals. Her life is filled with dramas, great and small. There's real colour and vibrancy within this community and Anjab's journey to acceptance makes compelling reading. She adopts a child, Zainab and later becomes embroiled in riots where her friend is killed and she's imprisoned. The complex story takes most of the first half of the book before switching to something completely different. There's a new tale involving three university friends and a shared love, a lady called Tila. The narrative is challenging and often seems fragmented, with disparate threads scattered throughout the conventional narrative in the form of diary entries, poems and lists. The reader needs to persevere; sometimes the text seems almost surreal, but there is an order which is eventually brough together.

People, places, ideas burst forth from every page. At first, this can seem like a bit of a muddle and it's almost too clever, but the novel explores important themes in a particular and unique way. Struggles for respect, recognition and love, are racked up to consider political oppression, gender and equality issues, global ignorance, injustices, both local and global, including Bhopal.

It's a book which is difficult to summarise. I enjoyed the enveloping sense of the first part and was disconcerted by a total change in the middle. But ultimately, and with a slower second reading, it all came together. Many are the real voices of real people and they're commanding. I felt their pleasure, pain and anguish and on balance, this us a really rewarding read for anyone prepared to invest just a little effort. It's astonishing.

My thanks to the publisher for a review copy via Netgalley.

Roy’s first novel, God of Small Things, received both popular and critical acclaim – could she equal its success with her second book, twenty years on? The short answer is: almost.

Anjum is a ‘hijra’ (translated as hermaphodite, intersex, third gender or transgender); born with both male and female genitalia, she finally finds refuge in a graveyard, where she sets up a sanctuary among the dead. Tilo is a mysterious woman who fell in love with someone the ‘wrong side of the line’ in Kashmir. We follow their stories, and meet a grand cast of other traumatised misfits.

Primarily, however, this is a novel about India, and the brutal after-effects of the Partition, and what happens when you end up the ‘wrong side of the line’. When the British left India, they divided the country crudely, creating the (mainly Muslim) Pakistan and the (mainly Hindu) India, dividing families and communities, and exacerbating religious wars. In the intervening twenty years, Roy has been a political activist, so although the narrative simmers with rage, this is nuanced, rather than polemic. It ends with a note of hope and redemption in unexpected places.

Though it is complex, meandering and, at times, hard work, there are pockets of prose that take your breath away, and the quality makes it worth persevering. Seventy years after Britain carved up India, this makes for powerful and timely reading.

Twenty years after the publication of her critically acclaimed and popular Booker Prize-winning novel THE GOD OF SMALL THINGS, Arundhati Roy has returned to fiction with THE MINISTRY OF UTMOST HAPPINESS. It is a novel that fearlessly confronts Indian conflicts and culture with a keen, critical and caring intelligence, as well as with a searing wit. A diverse and loosely related collection of quite compelling characters expose readers to a variety of perspectives on everything from love and family to politics and gender in modern India.

The book opens with a hijra named Anjum. Raised as a boy named Aftab, Anjum came to live with other transgender individuals as a teenager. After a life of adventure and admiration, Anjum retires to a cemetery and eventually creates her own home and community there. Living with her among the graves at what comes to be called the Jannat Guest House and Funeral Services is a young man named Saddam Hussain. Having suffered oppression and witnessed terrible violence as a low caste Hindu, he has remade himself as a Muslim and supports himself with several entrepreneurial enterprises.

The pair offers safe haven to others, including the mysterious Tilo and Miss Jebeens, the newborn baby she has “kidnapped.” Tilo is the enigmatic object of affection of three men: Musa, Naga and Garson Hobart, the four having met in a college theatrical production. After school, the friends, with Musa and Tilo a married couple, find that their youthful idealism is challenged by the realities of career and social expectations, as well as the ongoing struggles in Kashmir.

While a lot happens in THE MINISTRY OF UTMOST HAPPINESS, this is a character- and idea-driven novel. It takes place in liminal spaces --- intersections, edges and graveyards. The people, too, seem “between” or other. They often have multiple or hidden identities and find the need to retreat from their own pasts to survive. Roy asks her readers to do some heavy lifting, and in her most successful moments offers them amazing insights that are specific to India and completely universal. However, she moves between the interlocking stories of her characters with an abruptness that is jarring. She also moves between styles, mostly using a carefully descriptive narrative but peppering it with surreal asides, police reports, strange and dreamy passages, the last ravings of a dying woman, bits of poetry, philosophy and more.

The novel sometimes feels cluttered, but there is much to enjoy and savor as the plot lines, figures, symbols and meanings are sifted through. The story is almost cubist in its use of surprising perspective, reflecting, of course, the splintered lives and viewpoints of its characters. This is also a fiercely political novel, which should come as no surprise to those familiar with Roy’s nonfiction work. Still, it remains totally humane and compassionate throughout. And, in the end, Roy is able to tie together all the disparate pieces and deliver a strong, moving and impactful conclusion.

THE MINISTRY OF UTMOST HAPPINESS is sure to seal Arundhati Roy’s reputation as a novelist of grace and acumen.

Reviewed by Sarah Rachel Egelman

I was savoring the idea of reading this book because I so loved God Of Small Things. The book started out with an interesting story albeit wierd. Gradually it disintegrated into a fragmented, confusing mixture of people places and things. I could not keep track of the random characters with long Indian names and the places that I have no idea about and no connection to the story. Ms. Roy has a talent for writing but has indulged herself with too many words that are meaningless to most English speaking readers. Impossible to follow the story line and the characters are fairly disgusting. I was not able to develop a compassion for any of the characters or even like them. What a shame after so many years. She should stick to whatever she’s been doing and hire a coherent editor.

Review of "The ministry of utmost happiness" by Arundhati Roy.
I approached her second work of fiction with great anticipation. After all her first one, "God of small things" was such a masterpiece. I am happy to report that her ability to tell a story remains undiminished.
The story telling technique in the beginning is somewhat similar to that of Salman Rushdie in Satanic Verses. It seems surreal and there is a certain amount of mystery about the characters. The story of Anjum, a transgender woman, builds fast enough and engagingly enough. There are many intricate details about lives of eunuch community of which I had no prior knowledge. I have only seen the Indian eunuchs as depicted in the movies and, occasionally, in real life. After reading her story, one doesn't but feel sympathy for these social outcasts. Hopefully the modernity will bring some peace to their lives.
Alas, about a third into the story, Roy goes seriously astray. She goes too much into details about the events that took place in the early 2000s, however, without naming names. Most Indians know these stories, but the narrative is jarring and seems pointless in the context of the story.
The transitioning into the second set of characters, who turn out to be the central characters is a bit slow. Initially Tilo is very unidimensional without too much insight into her character at all. In fact throughout the story she remains an enigmatic character and she never directly expresses her opinion or feeling. In fact the author's tone about about the horrific events in Gujarat of 2002 and Kashmir later on, remains understated and to the point of being indifferent, though it is clear, while these events are shocking and devastating, by making them seem ordinary she wants to show how normal they have become in India, especially in Kashmir. Unfortunately this technique works only a few times; after a while it becomes jarring.
Musa's character on the other hand is better developed and
better expressed. His opinions and thoughts, clearly those of the author, are profound and interesting.
In the end I am left with the feeling that Roy took on too much material and had to squeeze it in a reasonable sized book. This turns out to be her book's undoing. Clearly she sympathizes with the Kashmir separatists and the Maoist Guerrillas of Bastar (a third angle thrown in with other two stories, but seems totally irrelevant). She has not done a good job of balancing her own bias with the facts and justifications on the other side of the debate. Instead of one, she should have written three books to do justice to all the stories that she wanted to tell. I will give this book 3 stars out of 5.

A friend from India gave this book to me. On my trip to India I was asking a lot of questions about culture and history, so she thought it would interesting for me to read this book. She warned me though that the book is tedious and boy, was she right!

I’m 60 pages in. The start was very promising! Still is promising, however I’m starting to struggle with too many details.

There are many Hindi words that the author adds in her story telling, which is ok, it adds a lot of color! I have to look them up to understand the meaning. However on top of that there are many characters, many names, many stories that are not tied together very well, so it makes it overwhelming and not memorable at all.

I will keep reading though.

Why oh why did I spent so much time on this before finally closing it? Because the first 100 pages wrapped me in, I stuck with this long past enjoyment and into slog. Somehow the storytelling got lost in I'm not sure what. I can't imagine trying to read this without some background knowledge of India/Pakistan, Hinduism, Islam, and so on- and even then ..... I finally gave up when I realized that I didn't know what the deal was with Tilo, despite having read more or less the same thing about her from different angles, but more importantly, I just didn't care. More power to those who finish- it's got some terrific writing but bogged down for lack of clarity.

Judging from many of the comments, a number of readers found this text "disjointed", "fragmented", "difficult", "clunk", and such. One comment noted "I do know that Ms. Roy is an “activist” but not exactly what or who she is for and against. She embraces so many diverse causes it is difficult to know where she stands on most of them. She is pro-Palestinian, pro-Naxalite, anti-Globalist...," followed (to their credit) with, "Read it and help me out.".

No doubt, MUH is textually and culturally complex. Naomi Klein admitted she is going to have to "re-read" MUH to fully appreciate its genius. Not surprising, then, that many of us more 'ordinary readers' may have to re-re-reread it to begin to understand just how brilliantly its story is laid out. I'm only on my 2nd reading, but already the ah-ha's are beginning to show themselves

I'm going to take a stab at the problem some of the 2- and 3-star comments said they were having with reading/following MUH. I think the difficulty may be in readers' expectations of how a novel should unfold itself in a proper meaningful, usually linear, way with enough contextual clues to always know where you are and why you are there as you follow the story. In the case of MUH, it strikes me that the brilliance of the work is in its seeming disjointedness inherent in the subject, and not the result of bad editing or writing at all. Roy is not simply following a path here (a densely political path at that), but seems more engaged in an exercise of connecting the dots that relate the intimate details of her characters lives with the enormous complexity which is ultimately the history of all of India (and the U.S., and the world) and its control and manipulation of the 1.5 billion people that live there. These are lives woven into the fabric of manufactured racism and prejudice, religious foment and geopolitical ambitions (and whose life isn't, these days?)

As we are finding out in the post-rational world of Donald Trump, the subcontinent of India, too, is beset with small "errors" that are ever playing one group of people against another—one political ambition, one religious fanatic rendering of "what is normal", one exercise of callous disregard of humanity and dignity that are written into its 5,000 year old history. In her collection of political essays ("The End of Imagination") everything is laid out neatly as the truth & consequences of India's social and political manipulations. There, the flaws are revealed, one after another, through the presentation of a few outstanding examples of how the machinery of human bondage works. Huge dam building projects that often produce the exact opposite of the human relief and " technical development" its political leaders and investors promise; centuries of provoking caste and religious warfare that deliberately balkanizes and exploits people that differ only by some minute distance of philosophical doctrine or imagined self-importance on the ladders of power and social position. Those non-fiction essays are easy enough to follow, though, as we move from thesis to example, policy to consequence.

All of this is present in this novel, as well. But Roy chooses to examine things at their most personal and granular levels. At that level, the play of these forces within and between the characters and their surroundings loses its linearity, as it must. It is the vapors of the corporate state as it moves from declaring the "personhood" of itself as an inanimate object, on to acquiring the rights of ordinary humans and finally to systematically stifling the rights ordinary humans (the ones with the DNA) once had. What is one to do in the face of those compelling forces? What can be done? Where and how can one find survival, let alone refuge.

Displayed in tracts of critical theory, the parts of the machine can be shown in their exploded diagrams and inter-connected board rosters. But at the decidedly personal human level, all such methodical linearity could show its parts of humans and their collateral gore being ground to bits in the machinery of the modern state. What defense is there against such a juggernaut? It's the question of tactical survival that faces everyone of us (who are given the choice to either die without healthcare, or starve to death watching our food being exported overseas to be processed and sold back to us.). They are merely traces of vapor trails when played through the multiple threats to the daily life of every human on this planet. In this work, I suggest Roy came as close as anyone I know to giving these forces visible, human form -- from the moment of our contrariness, to fleeing in search of some insulated refuge, to rebuilding in the abandoned lands of the dead. It's all their, I believe. But it will take a little effort and a few re-reads to find it.

Having waited two decades for another novel by Arundhati Roy, I dove into her new book titled, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. I’m glad I did. She pulls readers into the sights, smells, sounds and people of India, especially the marginalized ones. Don’t worry about keeping track of everything that’s going on. Let Roy take you across the subcontinent and over decades of time. Her prose is finely written in this epic novel and those readers who enjoy finely written literary fiction are those most likely to appreciate this novel.

Rating: Four-star (I like it)

This is a story that goes behind the headlines and reveals how the lives of the majority were affected and continue to be affected by the Indo-Pak partition, long-standing prejudices, greed, corruption, religious conflict and widespread poverty. I loved the character development and how the writer masterfully draws you into their widely different lives that ultimately intersect, showing how we all share a common humanity. I became so emotionally invested in the characters that I didn’t want the book to end.

This book taken one chapter at a time is written beautifully and in such a way that paints a sad picture with bright colors. I just couldn’t get past the abrupt transitions and unnecessarily open ended stories. Sometimes I had no idea what a chapter was about until it was almost done. I like that the story ends the way real life flows with a little happy and a little sad. However, I did feel like there was a bout four different endings that left me unsure about where it was going.

This novel did not meet my expectations for a good, cogent story as it meanders through many unrelated events with no tying common theme. It almost appears to be a show-off of this author's know-how of changing world through tales of fuzzy friendship, love, patriotism. cinematic phrases,scattered literary quotes, and various quarrelsome personalities. It DOES not read as a good novel, period. I am disappointed by the reviewers of numerous publishers unless I missed something entirely in their skills. Yes, I have reluctantly given two stars for a few interesting
episodes such as the one about Dr. Azadiya. I had read a biographical essay by Arundhati Roy which was indeed very impressive and hopefully, I shall find her writing likeable in another piece.

This is a beautifully written novel about a love story between a man from Kashmir and a woman from India. The writing is like poetry, it is so beautiful! Interwoven in the story, which takes place mostly in Delhi and Kashmir, are many colorful characters, including some transsexuals, murderers, and a man who has renamed himself Sadaam Hussein. You have to read it to find out why! There are also 2 adopted babies who are well loved by these colorful people.

“Their wounds were too old and too new, too different, and perhaps too deep, for healing. But for a fleeting moment, they were able to pool them like accumulated gambling debts and share the pain equally, without naming injuries or asking which was whose. For a fleeting moment they were able to repudiate the world they lived in and call forth another one, just as real.”

The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is the second novel by Booker Prize winning author, Arundhati Roy. The story begins with Aftab, whose confusion about what he was found relief at the Khwabgah, among other hijra. He became Anjum, and eventually she ran the Jannat Guest House (in its highly unusual location), a refuge for the quirky, the oppressed, the different.

Integral to the tale is S. Tilottama, real and adopted daughter of Maryam Ipe. Tilo’s story, and that of the three men who love her, is told not only by her, but by Dr Azad Bhartiya (fasting Free Indian), Biplab Desgupta (her ex-Intelligence Bureau landlord), and Musa Yeswi (elusive militant). Filling out the quirky cast are a paraven calling himself Saddam Hussain, Zainab the Bandicoot, Naga the journalist, a singing teacher, and an abandoned baby, to name just a few.

How all their lives intersect and how these lives are impacted upon by Government and policy, and in particular, the Kashmiri freedom struggles, is told using vignettes, anecdotes, loosely connected short stories, moral tales, memos, disjointed scraps, accounts that take detours and meander off on tangents. As with Rushdie, Seth and Mistry, this novel has that unmistakeable, essential Indian quality, in characters, in dialogue, in plot.

But here, moreso than in The God of Small Things, the fact that this is a novel by Arundhati Roy the social activist, is very much in evidence (as readers of her non-fiction works will attest) and thus includes illustrations of the many issues against which she rails. Some reviewers describe this novel as “preachy”; the causes are worthy, but readers may feel that is it is only a shade off being exactly that, and perhaps be forgiven for wishing that it was more novel, less moral tale.

Some of Roy’s descriptive prose, as with in The God of Small Things, is staggeringly beautiful, poetic and profound: “They understood of course that it was a dirge for a fallen empire whose international borders had shrunk to a grimy ghetto circumscribed by the ruined walls of an old city. And yes, they realised that it was also a rueful comment on Mulaqat Ali’s own straitened circumstances. What escaped them was that the couplet was a sly snack, a perfidious samosa, a warning wrapped in mourning, being offered with faux humility by an erudite man who had absolute faith in his listeners’ ignorance of Udru, a language which, like most of those who spoke it, was gradually being ghettoized.”

However, the vague and veiled references to certain personages, events and ideas which are, perhaps, obvious to those familiar with Indian current affairs, will go straight over the heads of other readers, the message will be lost or less than clear. There is humour, heartache, despair and hope, there is much cruelty but also abundant kindness, making it a moving and powerful read.

There are two books in Arundhati Roy’s ‘The Ministry of Utmost Happiness’. The first is a disjointed account of marginalised people in Delhi society, interspersed with frequent denunciations of India’s corrupt and ineffective politics. The second is a more moving account of the repression of the Kashmir insurgency. Arundhati Roy is writing both as novelist and as political activist. This works better in the second half of the book where her story of Tilo and Musa approaches the rich character study of her ‘The God of Small Things’. It makes perseverance through the first half of the book worthwhile.

I was looking forward to Ms Roy' s next book after God of Small Things but was sorely disappointed in this one. The first part- first two chapters - were interesting enough but it took a nose dive soon after. Disjointed and read like utter nonsense! I couldn't even get through finishing the book. Obviously a one wonder book author here...

I have waited too long since I put down God of Small Things in College ( i devoured it in two nights and a day). Through the characters in the The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, Roy, once again weaves an intricate novel with the main characters belonging to the desenfranchised of not just Sub-continental society but to relatively different degrees in all societies. She introduces us to their; thoughts, struggles, hopelessness, resilience and date I say it, as the inward turmoil subsides an eventual peace with who they are. It is microscopic in when looked at the characters or even their immediate culture, however it is microscopic when we see the same battles in ourselves and others in societies around the world, albeit in different forms (racism, ethnicity, class, creed, wealth, poverty). Roy smashes these man made - superficial safe parameters we draw around ourselves ( our identity) and shows us how well and alive we are in each of her characters. A brilliant piece of literature. Cleverly written and an absoloute joy to read for the inquisitive mind. Bravo!

One of the badly written and narrated journal (book/novel ??) I came across this year. Wasted my time entirely except learning all the abusive and swearing phrases and curse words, the book is full with in. So if you want to learn how to swear in northern India just use this one as your guide book!

This book shows that Arundhati Roy's gift for captivating stories has not diminished since The God of Small Things almost twenty years ago. Ministry is a witty, often spellbinding examination of India. It is political and frequently fiercely critical, although it often disguises its most savage burns with humor. Roy feels like an effortlessly talented writer, but this time around there are some structural issues that keep her novel from perfection. Ministry feels a bit unfocused. This is not to say every book must have a strict narrative that goes from point A to point B, but the way this book is set up makes it feel like it is constantly restarting itself. The first hundred pages feel like a novel on their own, except there isn't any resolution because we still have three hundred pages to go. Roy keeps taking left turns to explore a new character or idea, and each section is dependent on how you respond to the new character or situation. Personally, I felt so captivated by the first hundred pages that I desperately wanted more. I wanted a novel that took those ideas and characters and expanded them to get the time I felt they deserved. Every diversion felt like it was taking me further away from what I wanted. And whenever the characters from the first hundred pages returned it felt dissatisfying because they had lost all narrative momentum.

Ministry is more like a collection of interconnected stories than a novel. While the result is certainly better than average, I can't help wishing it had a little more focus.

This was a reading ordeal that left me cold and confused. The plot, such as it is, was so difficult to follow that I found myself speed reading to what I hoped would be a redeeming finish. The finish did not redeem. Whilst the characters of God Of Small Things stayed with me for ages after reading, I was glad to say goodbye to the cast of Ministry. Perhaps one exception was the character of Anjum, but she was largely abandoned 100 or so pages in, just as she was starting to be humanised.

worst book i've read and i am an avid reader...extremely confusing and has no plot to speak of...people kept asking me what the book was about and all i could say was "i don't know"...i really tried to give it a chance to get better and read till about 300 pages and finally had to put it down...couldn't even finish it

I looked forward with great anticipation to reading this novel but was disappointed early on. It read like a nonfiction and was both brutal and unnerving. No characters were consistent enough to draw me in. After 319 pages, I quit.

Arundhati Roy, an intellectual of an exceptional caliber, a rare Indian brain that needs to be heard and listened to, here she writes about the marginalization of the Kashmiri people who want the UN resolutions on Kashmir to be implemented and of course let's the world know that the aboriginal community in India is beaten by a sledgehammer all the time. Hats off to such a great warrior of the word.

The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (MUH) is a very good book. Maybe it is not as enjoyable as The God of Small Things (GST), Arundhati Roy's first novel, It can even be said that in literary terms it is not as good as GST, both because of the novel's structure and the writing itself. It is not the kind of book where you easily identy yourself with one or some of the characters.
However, it is still a first rate novel, interesting and touching. And besides it provides a lot of information about Indian society, its religions and its political problems. If you are as interested in India as I am you are in for a treat. Although it is a clear example of engaged literature, where the author obviously defends some points of view and persistently denounces problems such as inequalities of income and opportunity, it never falls into pamphletary one-sidedness - the author shows the weaknesses of all agents. Less than a black and white vision the book brings forth a whole rainbow of positions and trends.

A God of Small Things is one of the best books I've ever read, so when I saw that Arundhati Roy had finally written a second work of fiction, I was very excited. I saw that it had been nominated for the Booker Prize but that it wasn't reviewed particularly well, so I was hoping that the reviews were wrong, and that it was as good as her first.

Roy wrote several books of nonfiction essays since The God of Small Things, and The Ministry of Utmost Happiness reminded me of those essays. It was almost halfway between a book of fiction and a series of reflective nonfiction essays. The story line is the weak point. It really felt like there was no central story. The book follows Anjum, an intersex person who identifies as as a Hijra and a woman, from her troubled childhood through the various challenges of adulthood until she finds peace. Along the way, we learn about others that she makes connections with, in particular Tilo, and Tilo's love story with Musa, the Kashmir freedom fighter and rebel. Frankly, I felt the connection between Tilo and Anjum was contrived.

On their own, both the stories of Anjum and Tilo were interesting. I felt I learned a little about Kashmir. But without a truly unifying story, the book felt lacking. In addition, it did not help that there were probably hundreds of words that didn't appear in the Dictionary or Wikipedia I could access from my Kindle. After a while, I stopped trying to look them up, but for me, not knowing enough about the context and the story's references made it hard to fully appreciate it.

I think if I read this again, I might like it better, but it was a fairly long, dense book, so that will have to wait.

It is certainly different than her earlier book but in my opinion-no less brilliant.
Her writing is sometimes pure poetry, sometimes steeped in sorrow, pain, and so much heart.
Being an Indian, we have of course come to live with the issue of Kashmir's struggles but mostly turned a blind eye and a deaf ear because there just wasn't anything we thought we could do. But at least we could learn and educate ourselves on the issues from both sides..this book is an attempt at that education and very relate able.

This book started off with an interesting premise...exploring the story of an Intersex person born into a Muslim family in India. Its an unfamiliar topic thus making it instantly captivating. Then halfway through the novel the characters change, and the tone becomes political examining the conflict between India, Pakistan, and Kashmir. Unfortunately, I found the second part hard to read as it seemed unrelated to the first. It wasn't that the concepts were difficult to grasp...the novel at this point just felt too wordy, and I found myself skimming over certain parts. In the end, its tied all together but still on a whole it felt like a disjointed read.

English and writing style is excellent, unfortunately, the story is like propaganda against Hindu society. I realize that she is Hindu but every thing is about how Kashmiri Muslims are being ill treated and absolutely no mention of atrocities committed by Muslims against Hindus. As long as one considers this as a distorted story and nothing more, I guess it is entertaining book. Sure she will get awards, I have read books worse and had awards!

Lovely writing as is expected from Ms. Roy. If you contemplate the quote on the back of the cover, and read the book with that phrase in mind, then in retrospect, I feel it helps manage your expectations. I kept waiting for a conflict or plot or ebb/flow to appear, but I found each chapter is a slice of India, Kashmir, and the character's themselves unfold and you get to know them within the context of each chapter. I appreciated: the writing, the poetry, the scenes as they passed by, and the characters. I didn't feel as satisfied as I would with other books, but I enjoyed the read, and felt a sense of resolution in that even in dire straits and challenging experiences, some will inevitably find joy.

This novel about love and Kashmir is a little confusing. The writing is beautiful, the story is tragic, and the characters are idiosyncratic. But the ideas are many and not always easy to discern. I look forward to reading her next book.?

Most painful novel I've ever read. It's set in the Hindu/Muslim war and peace in Delhi and Kashmir, and in the bodies and minds of its Hijra (transsexual) and other protagonists. Eyes wide open (I cannot say unflinching, it's too much), boundless compassion. Tilo's epitaph says it all:
"How to tell a shattered story?
By slowly becoming everybody?
No.
By slowly becoming everything."

Arundhati Roy lives up to all the expectations built up in the twenty years since her debut novel. I liked it, I hated it, it made me cringe and I fell in love with it, all at the same time. I did lose track often half way into the book, but at the end, it all made sense. It painted a picture of India in my mind, an India that I have never experienced, and India that I have only heard of and watched in the news about, causing much pain. I might go back to this book time and again, to relish the beautifully told story and the intricate characters.

A very unexpected book. I found it very intrigue - not sure if I liked it, but it certainly drew me into it. I think this is a book that once read, it pops back into your mind over time as you digest it. It certainly challenged me - that is a good thing - books should do that otherwise we keep reading the same thing over and over only the people and places change. Thank you for the journey.

It's a good book but....it's too long and if you are not Indian or at last know a lot about India (like me for example), it's difficult to move around castas, political problems of the last 30 years, and names, names everywhere of everything; it didn't help the book to be easy to read. That said I like the part where Anjum was the main character more than the second part but Arundhati Roy is pretty good in describing a lot of characters without getting lost. Me reading not so much. It will take me another reading to get trough everything but it still worthy.

È un buon libro ma....é piuttosto lungo e se non siete persone che conoscono bene la cultura indiana (tipo me) é piuttosto facile perdersi tra le caste, i problemi politici degli ultimi 30 anni e tutti questi nomi di divinitá, templi e quant'altro; non aiuta certo a rendere il libro piú leggibile. Detto questo la parte che mi é piaciuta di piú é quella iniziale, dove la protagonista principale é Anjum, Arundhati Roy comunque é piuttosto capace nel descrivere situazioni corali piene di personaggi, io tendo invece a perdermici. Probabilmente sará necessario leggere di nuovo questo libro per afferrarlo completamente, ma resta il fatto che ne vale comunque la pena.

I don't live in India. So, I don't really know what it is to live among a hegemonic Hindu culture being a marginalised Muslim. But it can't be a good feeling, for a 16 year old Muslim boy was lynched to death by an angry Hindu mob for allegedly having beef in his food when he repeatedly said no, he didn't. From the perspective of the minorities living in India today, this book makes perfect sense.

I also write about marginalised people. I can fully empathise with this book.

Mehreen Ahmed author of Moirae.

The story was fascinating but I found the plot difficult to follow at times perhaps due to the numerous characters, some who had aliases or went by pet names. I don't know if this is due to my unfamiliarity with India and particularly Kashmir. I kept hoping for it to get better.

Loved "God of Small Things," a truly masterful story which I still compare my readings.
Passages of this book as delightful and funny as some are brutally realistic, although story
a bit difficult to follow at times.
Characters and situations will be imprinted in your memory if you are patient to finish the book.

I have an Audible subscription and was browsing for a new listen. I picked this book without reading any reviews, hoping for Indian story telling along the vein of Jhumpa Lahiri. Unfortunately, unlike Lahiri's, Roy's plot lines are wandering and incoherent and her characters are unsympathetic and developed without feeling. None of the characters have meaningful relationships with each other. Mothers give up sons without turning back; children leave mothers without sadness. A little bit of Indian history is thrown in here and there which is the only redeeming quality of the book. I still have 10 hours left on my Audible book and I'm just praying for it to be over.

It was sheer drudgery to get thru half the book. I quit after that. It started off very interestingly with a story of a hermaphrodite but then digressed into confusion of Kashmiri/Indian conflict and politics-ugh! Didn't seem like the same author as the wonderful "God of All Small Things"!!!

I listened to this book on Audible and the story was VERY hard to follow. It went on long tangents and when it was FINALLY I really don't know what the real plot of the story was. It may be better to actually read an epic story like this one.

one of the worst books I've ever read. Everything about it was offensive, glad I checked it out from the library instead of buying it, so I didn't have to get through a few chapters of awful, torturous story about pathetic characters.

How do you tell the truth in an era when facts and fiction and visa versa? With compassion, with poetry, with vulgarity that mirrors the vulgarity of the world. It's helpful to read this on an e-reader or take notes on the characters because there are damn near 100 of them, and all their lives intertwine, unravel, and renew in the most unexpected ways.

The Author takes on a journey of the great divide in the hearts of the various Indian peoples and their love for humanity. The suffering goes beyond class and family. It touches on the Kashmiri regional differences. A look into history.

I was so disappointed with this book. I was expecting something really great after all of the reviews. I always read at least 50 pages of a book before giving up. I wanted to but actually plowed this this fractured, difficult to read book.

Overall very disappointing...I would actually like to give this book 4 stars for some of the lovely imagery and engaging stories, and 2 stars for the disjointed political rants that belong in an opinion piece not stuffed in the middle of a piece of literature....so I settled for a 3 star rating.

Roy's style is as lyrical as ever. There was way too much packed in this book. Of course I loved the Kashmir part of the book the most. So close to my heart and she "gets" the ground reality. I will have to re-read this one day to absorb all the nuances.

It seems It is a story about everything.an Indian should not be proud of. The current transgender awareness wave is great timing to bring forward a heroine who had childhood as a boy in Delhi, Just as I am deep into her story and start to see her people's plight that I didn't comprehend before, the narrative takes on more and more. So many more types of victims with more misery that keeps repeating. Although she sprinkles poetry, pups and graveyard humor, I am relieved when the story ended,

A true masterpiece, the writing is amazing and captures the mood and sentiments amazingly. It's not a super easy read at times because it covers so much terrain, but mostly couldn't put it down. May not be for everyone, but I highly recommend it.

A wonderful book that I read in a few days. Beautiful images of India past and present. I found myself taken back to India and the many places in the book. The scenes at Janta Manta were especially vivid. I was transported by dream like passages that left me longing for more.
It is a shame so many readers gave such negitive reviews. It would appear that many Americans know so little of India and the world history in general. Some knowledge of South Asia would have made this a far more enjoyable read.

The author is a leftist pseudo secular elite, who wastes no time to undermine India's glorious past. The book is just another opportunity for her to vent her rants on the history while she never talks about various atrocities committed by Moghul, British, Nizam era etc.

Even if you leave out all the bias, the story telling sub par too.Don't waste your time on this.

This novel by Ms. Roy tackles several issues facing India today and weaves them into a compelling story with realistic characters. It's the kind of book that grows on the readers; the more you read, the more you want to know!

pathetic/sickening book, height of negativity, no idea for what purpose, author should check with psychologist how to be a bit positive about your own environment and society and how to create positive ripples instead of highly negative ones. .

This book doesn't hang together at all well. There are a few times when it starts to coherent, only to disintegrate again. If you loved "The God of Small Things", re-read it. Don't bother with this one.

I was totally absorbed by the story and the history of conflict in Kashmir. The prose was beautiful and the unusual characters fully developed. I could read it again and appreciate it even more. Not your usual plot driven read, but it all comes together in the end.

I already knew this book was getting terrible ratings, so I did not have high expectations. However, I still hoped that even if it would be bad, it would be bad with dignity. Unfortunately, this was not the case. While the first couple of pages were not that bad, everything thereafter was really terrible and confusing writing, with unrealistic, one-dimensional characters. I was left bored most of the time.

I already knew this book was getting terrible ratings, so I did not have high expectations. However, I still hoped that even if it would be bad, it would be bad with dignity. Unfortunately, this was not the case. While the first couple of pages were not that bad, everything thereafter was really terrible and confusing writing, with unrealistic, one-dimensional characters. I was left bored most of the time.

I came to know that most of my fan’s brains got fried after reading my novels “The God of Dirty Things: Bicker Prize Winner 2017”, “Things That Can and Cannot be Screwed”, “Broken Banana”, “The Hanging Of Faizal Guru”, “The Shape of The Breast”, etc. My fans are no longer able to live with religious Hindus peacefully. They are getting offended at anything remotely related to Hindu religion. This is hampering my fan’s physical and mental health. Unfortunately it is neither possible to avoid 80 crore Hindus, nor can we deport them to Andaman Islands. Hence I wrote this novel to help my fans get “reverse brainwash”. After reading this book, my fans may start treating Hindus as human beings. I would also like to apologize to all my fans for my past misdeeds.