Transmission - Softcover

Kunzru, Hari

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0452286514 ISBN 13: 9780452286511

Publisher: Plume Books, 2005

Synopsis

The award-winning writer of White Tears and The Impressionist takes an ultra-contemporary turn with the story of an Indian computer programmer whose luxurious fantasies about life in America are shaken when he accepts a California job offer.

Lonely and naïve, Arjun spends his days as a lowly assistant virus-tester, pining away for his free-spirited colleague, Christine. Arjun gets laid off like so many of his Silicon Valley peers, and in an act of desperation to keep his job, he releases a mischievous but destructive virus around the globe that has major unintended consequences. As world order unravels, so does Arjun's sanity, in a rollicking cataclysm that reaches Bollywood and, not so coincidentally, the glamorous star of Arjun's favorite Indian movie.

About this title

Review:

Transmission is Hari Kunzru's second novel and, in a similar vein to Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections, the title is instructive; it's figuratively and literally, the book's pulsing leitmotif. To transmit is, by definition, to "send across", and the migration of information and people, the destruction and the erection of borders in our hi-tech, supposedly global village, (a world where Indian graduates gain Australian accents working in local call centres) is what this novel is all about. Although to be clear, that's an "all about" in much the way that Jonathan Coe's What A Carve Up! was "all about" the Thatcherite 1980s; narrative invention, humour and satire form essential components of Kunzru's prodigious literary arsenal. (No prizes for guessing who Gavin Burger, an incomprehensively verbose US presidential spokesman who puts in a fleeting comic turn, could be modelled on.)

Leaving aside the broader forces of globalisation, Kunzru's chief dramatic agent is a computer virus that meshes together the lives of his main characters: Arjun Mehta, a sexually-naïve Indian programmer working in America who unleashes the contagion; Leela Zahir, a Bollywood actress whose image the bug zooms across the globe and Guy Swift, head of Tomorrow, a Shoreditch-based consultancy whose ongoing quest to harness the "emotional magma that wells from the core of planet brand", becomes somewhat nobbled in the immediate technological fallout. Of his cast, not unsurprisingly Guy comes closest to caricature (though his scheme to rebrand European border police as Ministry of Sound-style nightclub bouncers--"Europe: No Jeans, No Trainers"--sounds alarming believable). But then Guy's is the incarnate of the worst, Panglossian traits of the West in this callow information age. His certainty and self-absorbed fecklessness (which thankfully he does eventually suffer, horribly for) contrasts jarringly with poor, Mehta, whose American dreams tip, all too swiftly into nightmare. --Travis Elborough

Review:

Praise for Transmission

"Hari Kunzru [has] a skewering wit, wide sympathies and a gimlet eye for the killing or illuminating detail."--The Washington Post

"Kunzru's engagingly wired prose and agile plotting sweep all before them as the characters careen toward ruin."--The New Yorker

"Swiftly paced and cleverly plotted...the ride is exhilarating."--People

"With this second novel...the entertaining Mr. Kunzru makes it even clearer that he has a flair for culture clash and metamorphosis."--The New York Times

"A balance between high comedy and genuine pathos."--Time Out New York

"Kunzru...is as up-to-date as writers come, with interests in technology, pop culture and the economics of globalization. If anyone deserves a shot at breaching the literary space-time continuum and doing what logic says can't be done, it's Kunzru."--The New York Times Book Review

About this edition

• Publisher: Plume Books
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0452286514
• ISBN 13: 9780452286511
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 276