Narcopolis - Hardcover

Thayil, Jeet

3.43

7,547 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 159420330X ISBN 13: 9781594203305

Publisher: Penguin Pr, 2012

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Shortlisted for the 2012 Man Booker Prize

Jeet Thayil’s luminous debut novel completely subverts and challenges the literary traditions for which the Indian novel is celebrated. This is a book about drugs, sex, death, perversion, addiction, love, and god, and has more in common in its subject matter with the work of William S. Burroughs or Baudelaire than with the subcontinent’s familiar literary lights. Above all, it is a fantastical portrait of a beautiful and damned generation in a nation about to sell its soul. Written in Thayil’s poetic and affecting prose, Narcopolis charts the evolution of a great and broken metropolis.

Narcopolis opens in Bombay in the late 1970s, as its narrator first arrives from New York to find himself entranced with the city’s underworld, in particular an opium den and attached brothel. A cast of unforgettably degenerate and magnetic characters works and patronizes the venue, including Dimple, the eunuch who makes pipes in the den; Rumi, the salaryman and husband whose addiction is violence; Newton Xavier, the celebrated painter who both rejects and craves adulation; Mr. Lee, the Chinese refugee and businessman; and a cast of poets, prostitutes, pimps, and gangsters.

Decades pass to reveal a changing Bombay, where opium has given way to heroin from Pakistan and the city’s underbelly has become ever rawer. Those in their circle still use sex for their primary release and recreation, but the violence of the city on the nod and its purveyors have moved from the fringes to the center of their lives. Yet Dimple, despite the bleakness of her surroundings, continues to search for beauty—at the movies, in pulp magazines, at church, and in a new burka-wearing identity.

After a long absence, the narrator returns in 2004 to find a very different Bombay. Those he knew are almost all gone, but the passion he feels for them and for the city is revealed.

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Review:

'Jeet Thayil's Bombay is a city dreaming troubled dreams, and Narcopolis will change the way you imagine it.' --Hari Kunzru

'Completely fascinating and told with a feverish and furious necessity.'
--Alan Warner

'This is a compelling, often exhilarating debut. Thayil deftly weaves the various narrative threads, and his overheated, hypertrophied prose invites comparison with the greatest of all narco-novels: William Burroughs' Naked Lunch.' Financial Times

'At its best beautifully written, inventive and clear-eyed, Narcopolis deserves to be read and acclaimed.' Times Literary Supplement

'An evocative portrait ... Thayil's depiction of the addicts' slow disintegration until they become 'damaged strangers' and 'inanimate objects', even to themselves, is devastating' --New Statesman

'I wished that this book, like some long and delicious opium-induced daydream, would go on and on ... Narcopolis is a blistering debut that can indeed stand proudly on the shelf next to Burroughs and De Quincey.' --Guardian

'Narcopolis by Jeet Thayil plumbs the world of substance addiction with a feverish imaginative power. Written with a poet s eye for economy, its generous and unflinching vision drifts between dream, nightmare, and the sprawling real world of Mumbai that the characters struggle to inhabit. This journey is also a narrative of language and ideas, but what makes Narcopolis a truly great book is its compassion and hard-earned wisdom.' --Krys Lee, Financial Times Books of the Year

'This is a compelling, often exhilarating debut. Thayil deftly weaves the various narrative threads, and his overheated, hypertrophied prose invites comparison with the greatest of all narco-novels: William Burroughs' Naked Lunch.' Financial Times

'At its best beautifully written, inventive and clear-eyed, Narcopolis deserves to be read and acclaimed.' Times Literary Supplement

'an evocative portrait ... Thayil's depiction of the addicts' slow disintegration until they become "damaged strangers" and "inanimate objects", even to themselves, is devastating' --New Statesman

'I wished that this book, like some long and delicious opium-induced daydream, would go on and on ... Narcopolis is a blistering debut that can indeed stand proudly on the shelf next to Burroughs and De Quincey.' --Guardian

'Captures the Bombay underworld of the 1970s in all its intoxicating, poetic squalor.' --Observer

'I wished that this book, like some long and delicious opium-induced daydream, would go on and on ... Narcopolis is a blistering debut that can indeed stand proudly on the shelf next to Burroughs and De Quincey.' --Guardian

Book Description:

Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, Narcopolis by Jeet Thayil is a rich and hallucinatory novel, set around a Bombay opium den as the city transforms itself over three decades.

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