I don’t think enjoy is quite the right word, but it is impressive & certainly leaves its mark.
Although a novel, it seems very autobiographical, a meditation on the interior life (though nothing like the one by Mauriac). A story of migration, of (not) belonging, a dream; of the dislocations that come with the end of Empires. Verging sometimes on the magically realistic (“Just after the birth of her second child something had happened in her head, & she found herself walking in a part of the capital that she didn’t know ….”).
It tells the story of Willie Chandran who, “when he was 20 … the mission school student who had not completed his education, with no idea of what he wanted to do, except to get away from what he knew, & yet with very little idea of what lay outside the world he knew, only with the fantasies of the Hollywood films of the 30s & 40s that he had seen at the mission school, went to London.”
It may also be the only book I have read which gives a (delicately put) mans view of sexual awakening & infidelity: “It was like being given a new idea of myself.”
*****
“If you are not used to governments or the law or society or even history being on your side, then you have to believe in your luck or your star or you will die.”
