We’re thrilled to be partnering with Asia House to reach more readers this year as part of their Festival of Asian Literature programme. Our aim is to introduce reading groups to new literature, authors and cultures.
We partnered with four library services whose reading groups each received a set of books and reading guides for Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo, The Prisoner of Paradise by Romesh Gunesekera, The Village by Nikita Lalwani and Narcopolis by Jeet Thayil. The reading groups have been reading and reviewing the titles and will be meeting the authors in October. Find out what they thought here.
Meet the groups, the books and their recommendations
Lye Down with a Good Book Reading Group: The Prisoner of Paradise
We are a group of 25 members from many different backgrounds and ages (30-75 years old). We meet once a month at Lye library in the West Midlands and always have very interesting meetings. Everyone is asked to give their views on our chosen book for the month and we often have visiting authors, competitions and a feature called Desert Island Books (what eight books would you take?). We have been meeting for 18 months and love our Wednesday evenings.
About The Prisoner of Paradise by Romesh Gunesekera
When Lucy Gladwell arrives in Mauritius from England to live with her aunt and uncle in their grand plantation house, her mind is full of the poems of Keats and tales of romance . She is nonetheless unprepared for the beauty, fecundity and otherness of this island paradise between Africa and India, where she is to be waited on hand and foot by servants and free to let her thoughts drift on the sea breeze. If only they did not drift to such problematic subjects as the restrictions of colonial society, or the bigoted outbursts of her uncle, or the disquieting attractions of Don Lambodar, a young translator from Ceylon, himself entangled in thoughts of iniquity and desire and facing a decision which could risk his precarious position. Under the surface there is growing unease. For it is 1825: Britain has wrested power from France and is shipping convict labour across the Indian Ocean. The age of slavery is coming to its messy end. Word is lapping against the shores of the island – of revolts in Europe and the Americas, and of a charismatic new Indian leader who will shine the light of liberty. For Lucy, for Don, for everyone on the island, a devastating storm is coming…
What they thought of The Prisoner of Paradise
We thought that this book was very poetic and the detail in the description was amazing. The language was well chosen. The concept and setting of the book were good but we felt that it lacked excitement and pace. The characters needed more depth and background. Some of the more interesting characters were only mentioned in passing. A member of our group has a background in Mauritius and questioned some of the facts in the book. We liked the story but wanted so much more from it. The writing was great but the plot needed to deliver more.
Lye Down’s Top Three Books
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
Before I Go to Sleep by S. J. Watson
Rutherford Readers: Behind the Beautiful Forevers
There are 22 Rutherford Readers. We meet once a month in term time and have been running 8 years. As most of the ladies were of a certain age, a lot have retired now so they have plenty of time to read inbetween their travels. They often try and visit a place mentioned in the books we have read and bring photos back or share websites with us. (We do have some gents with us now too!) The group is open to all the staff at school and we circulate lists of recommended books and open invitations to join us, so we have quite a few younger staff with us now.
The meetings open with tea and cakes – cooked by Chris who is a brilliant pastry chef and baker; then lots of catching up on what’s happening at school. After about half an hour of gossip we usually discuss the book we are reviewing. We then go round the group and people recommend other books they’ve read. Kate takes notes and puts together a newsletter for us all with a summary of what we thought of the book and our recommended reads. This is then circulated to the group and to the rest of the staff who often go on to read the books even if they can’t make the meeting.
About Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo
Annawadi is a slum at the edge of Mumbai Airport, in the shadow of shining new luxury hotels. Its residents are garbage recyclers and construction workers, economic migrants, all of them living in the hope that a small part of India’s booming future will eventually be theirs. But when a crime rocks the slum community and global recession and terrorism shocks the city, tensions over religion, caste, sex, power, and economic envy begin to turn brutal. As Boo gets to know those who dwell at Mumbai’s margins, she evokes an extraordinarily vivid and vigorous group of individuals flourishing against the odds amid the complications, corruptions and gross inequalities of the new India.
Rutherford Readers Recommend
A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini
Toast by Nigel Slater
Anything by Kate Atkinson
The Millennium Trilogy by Stieg Larsson
Gayton Reading Group: The Village
We meet on the second Monday every month, and have been meeting for about 7 years now. At the moment there are 9 of us, and we formed due to the long waiting list the original reading group based at Gayton Library. Our views and tastes are varied, but we think the best books are the ones that make want to read other books by the same author. Most of the group like classic writers, and enjoyed revisiting old favourites. Popular authors for our group have been David Mitchell, Marina Lewycka, Markus Zusak and Hilary Mantel.
About The Village by Nikita Lalwani
Ray, a young British-Asian woman arrives in the afternoon heat of a small village in India. She has come to live there for several months to make a documentary about the place. For this is no ordinary Indian village – the women collecting water at the well, the men chopping wood in the early morning light have all been found guilty of murder. The village is an open prison. Ray is accompanied by two British colleagues and, as the days pass, they begin to get closer to the lives of the inhabitants of the village. As the British visitors become desperate for a story, the distinction between innocence and guilt, between good intentions and horrifying results becomes horribly blurred.
What they thought of The Village
“_The idea behind this book was a very good one, but the way it was written did not grip this reader. The cardboard characters, the constant unnecessary technical descriptions of the filming equipment, the wrong usage of certain words – I have never heard hair described as muscular before! And the word ‘vicious’ was used when another meaning was intended. The gratuitous swearwords, the cobbled together conflicts between the three main characters – it is as if the author was told the ingredients to include and then put them in after the book was written. I’d give The Village four marks out of 10_.”
“Found the book thoughtful, extremely well written, easy to read. She describes India well, the rich colourful world and cultures. Having spent quite a lot of time there in the past felt she bought alive the people and country. The book had quite a moral centre: who is superior to whom. Ray went as a fellow Indian, brought up in this country, expecting to understand and be understood. However, the local people watching the team at work just found them drug riddled and thoroughly unsavoury. Media ethics were explored: The team went there to make a documentary but she showed us how the feelings of the subjects were trampled on by manipulation to get sensational stories. Characters were beautifully drawn and one felt more sympathetic toward Nandini and Jyoti than to the three team members. Overall an extremely good, interesting work by someone who obviously knew her subjects well.”
“I enjoyed the story, but I did feel that the characters were a bit lacking in places. You felt like you weren’t being told the full story – whether it be about Ray and the reasons behind some of her behaviour, or Serena, and why she was so unhappy about being there. However, the background was absolutely fascinating, and would love to find out more about facilities like these. A very brave topic for a fairly new novelist.”
Grayton Reading Group recommend
Anything by Diana Athill
The Poisonwood Bible and The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver
Anything by Charles Dickens.
North Harrow Library Reading Group, thoughts on The Village
We felt that subject had a lot of potential (media manipulation), but possibly was not fully realised. A story of disintegration, which begins with hope and optimism and ends in the collapse of a project and in relationships. It holds attention most of the time. It is not really surprising that media people want to create stories and drama for their own sake, but it is still depressing. Not much of a glimmer of hope in the book – just escape or running away at the end, but not by a proper prisoner.
We enjoyed the subject and found open prison concept interesting. However, the language was ungrammatical in places and there are too many attempts at flowery description. We liked the cover and found The Village a quick read.
Some readers thought it rather simplistic and thought the main character too naïve and silly to be believable. Felt the idea that the English born Indian expected erroneously to find herself at home in India because she spoke the language interesting, but unsurprising. We discussed the theme of “home”. Media manipulation particularly stood out to us as thought provoking, as well as the effect on the criminal’s family of having to live in prison.
By and large the plot and characters were believable. The characters are generally not attractive: Nandini has integrity, Ray has humanity, but many weaknesses. The others in the crew are self-obsessed without much feeling for others.
Reading groups in West Sussex
There are four reading groups in West Sussex reading Narcropolis by Jeet Thayil – Books in the Afternoon, Phoenix Book Group. Shoreham Library Monday Group and Worthing Library Tuesday Group.
About Narcopolis by Jeet Thayil
Shuklaji Street, in Old Bombay. In Rashid’s opium room the air is thick with voices and ghosts: Hindu, Muslim, Christian. A young woman holds a long-stemmed pipe over a flame, her hair falling across her eyes. Men sprawl and mutter in the gloom. Here, they say you introduce only your worst enemy to opium. There is an underworld whisper of a new terror: the Pathar Maar, the stone killer, whose victims are the nameless, invisible poor. In the broken city, there are too many to count.
What Worthing Library Tuesday Group thought of Narcopolis
_A difficult book to read and indeed some members of the group did not take it very far. In general we felt that it was a novel about ABUSE. This went from abuse of India to Bombay to the characters, who themselves had been abused, physically, and were abusing themselves, with drugs. The drug taking changed from the slow ceremonial dreamlike quality of Opium smoking to the ‘modern’ addiction and dependency on chemical drugs that seemed to generate a manic selfishness. An ever increasing need for money is perhaps becoming as great a drug? It was generally felt that the writing was excellent and the background of poetry writing by the author is very evident. Dimple was the character that evoked the most sympathy and her life as portrayed most painful and sad. Difficult book to sum up briefly. _
What individual members thought of Narcopolis
“It was easy to read and get into the characters. Very atmospheric of old Bombay, with a strong sense of time and place, very evocative. There was a good contrast between the grime of street life and the hallucinatory world induced by drug taking, interesting diverse characters and very believable. We were impressed with the writing and enjoyed it. The plot and character were completely convincing. I would recommend this book to others, particularly to those with an interest in Indian culture and history and those with an interest in drug related writing.” Jim
“I was a little disappointed – I was looking forward to reading it but found it disjointed. I liked the stories of the different characters within the book and I liked the descriptions of Bombay as I visited there a lot during the late 70’s so recognised a lot of what the author described. The plot and characters were believable, but the flow of the story was fragmented and detracted from my overall enjoyment.” Susan.
“Bombay is Narcopolis, simultaneously city of the dead and city of drugs. Shuklaji Street with its dens, prostitute cages, brothels, paan sellers, jelabi stalls and dealers of all kinds has at its centre Rashid’s opium house which is also the centre of the novel. Other parts of the city seem hazy; the coast, Grant Bridge and the many cinemas offering an alternative world are peripheral to Rashid’s. The street, at the end of the novel is largely sanitized with a McDonalds and supermarkets. Rashid’s has become an IT call centre run by his son Jamal. So the new enterprises have been built on the old which are suppressed but not wholly obliterated.
“As heroin (garad) takes over from opium the brutality of relationships intensifies. The ritual of the opium pipe seems a kind of courtesy far removed from the queue waiting for the excretion of heroin. The novel is unflinching in its presentation of sex and brutality and as the characters succumb to garad with its chemical admixture they know they are shortening their lives and relationships become more desperate. They are compared to plague victims, flung alive into burial carts when ‘men and women fell on each other like animals’, and Dimple sees herself and Rashid ’ in a frenzy to the death’ (191).
“Language is the novel’s strength, showing the author’s musical and poetic background. The prologue is reminiscent of Molly’s ‘Penelope’ soliloquy in Joyce’s Ulysses, not only in its unbroken continuity but in its movement towards the abandonment of inhibition. Joycean echoes are also heard in Dimple’s version of Hail Mary.
“The novel’s humour lies in the author’s ability to mimic various linguistic styles: in the ‘works’ of S.T. Pande, Xavier’s reading and the impossible sonnet structure outlines by Soporo. Apart from the dark pun of the title, there are others: ‘silly cones’ when Xavier recommends breast implants to Dimple’s tai. Rashid’s version of Dum maro dum , the original of which he cannot sing because ’ it is too Hindu ’ becomes Dum aloo dum (potato curry). [probably much more here for anyone knowing the language].
“Although the description of the opium ritual is striking – all drugs have their rituals- it is impossible for an outsider to know how authentic the descriptions of the drug’s effects are because they are within a state of individual consciousness and therefore solipsistic. But the morphing of one character’s experience into another’s – ’ the leaking of dreams’ is striking.
“The narrator came to drugs to lose himself ‘the reason people like me get into drugs’ (211). Dimple begins with opium to alleviate her real, physical pain but is drawn deeper because drugs and the khana provide her with the family she lacks (230). Bengali is educated and seems to have been drawn to opium for the same reason as Dom. Rumi seems psychopathically bent on destruction, his own and other’s [ the Pathar Maar? (267) ] and drugs seem an inevitable part of this.
“It is unlikely that Dimple could have avoided her fate. Given to the priest or taken by her mother to the brothel as a child (like several others in the novel hers is an unreliable narrative) For a hijra there was little else she could do and the pain which led her to opium was a result of her castration. She is intelligent and beautiful and in another world might have had many opportunities but in the Bombay of her time none.
“Within the world of the novel, religion does define the characters, less in its practice than as an identity. Rashid despite his livelihood and lifestyle, teaches his children the Koran, is fearful of sin (142) and in old age becomes devout. His son Jamal and fiancée Farheen, though they have sex and drink, see themselves as good Muslims. They legitimize their cocaine dealing as their duty, as it is only sold to non-Muslims (284). Rashid is proud of his supposed descent from the Moghuls as is Rumi of his Brahmanism and Rishi descent. His wife’s Jainism he treats with contempt which is reciprocated by her family towards his Hinduism. Dimple is part Hindu, part Christian and wears — literally — a Muslim identity in her burkha as Zeenat. During the anti-Muslim riots she wears a dress, passes as Christian and rescues the young Jamal.
“Money is the supreme religion of the city. When Dimple leaves the brothel, she is trading money for pleasure ‘variations of this transaction occurred on the street a thousand times a day’ (130).. Although not acknowledged Pakistan exports the low grade heroin with collusion from the authorities because it is ‘a multi-crore business and in Bumbai [sic] money is the only religion’ (199) overriding the current anti-Muslim stance.” Stella
h2. Get involved
Live in or near Worthing? Don’t miss Worthing Library’s event with Jeet Thayil taking place at 7.00 pm 11th October.
Read any of the books in your reading group? Let us know what you thought by posting a comment below.
