2017 Man Booker Prize Longlist2018 Women’s Prize for Fiction LonglistThe Ministry of Utmost Happiness is a dazzling new novel by the internationally celebrated author of The God of Small Things. It takes us on an intimate journey of many years across the Indian subcontinent—from the cramped neighborhoods of Old Dehli and the roads of the new city to the mountains and valleys of Kashmir and … mountains and valleys of Kashmir and beyond, where war is peace and peace is war.
It is an aching love story and a decisive remonstration, a story told in a whisper, in a shout, through unsentimental tears and sometimes with a bitter laugh. Each of its characters is indelibly, tenderly rendered. Its heroes are people who have been broken by the world they live in and then rescued, patched together by acts of love—and by hope.
The tale begins with Anjum—who used to be Aftab—unrolling a threadbare Persian carpet in a city graveyard she calls home. We encounter the odd, unforgettable Tilo and the men who loved her—including Musa, sweetheart and ex-sweetheart, lover and ex-lover; their fates are as entwined as their arms used to be and always will be. We meet Tilo’s landlord, a former suitor, now an intelligence officer posted to Kabul. And then we meet the two Miss Jebeens: the first a child born in Srinagar and buried in its overcrowded Martyrs’ Graveyard; the second found at midnight, abandoned on a concrete sidewalk in the heart of New Delhi.
As this ravishing, deeply humane novel braids these richly complex lives together, it reinvents what a novel can do and can be. The Ministry of Utmost Happiness demonstrates on every page the miracle of Arundhati Roy’s storytelling gifts.
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This is another amazing depiction of India by Roy. Her characters are the outsiders in Indian society, they are complex and come from all religions who the reader gets to know intimately . There is huge humanity and kindness in this book as well as tragedy – what makes it a great novel!
A marvelous twist of the love story amidst the Kashmir war. You can feel and smell India on every page. A brilliant book that you will read again and again.
3.5 stars. I really wanted and expected to love this novel. “The God of Small Things” was one of my all-time favorite reads, and I eagerly anticipated this second novel from Roy, after a long 20-year wait. But this was a struggle to get through. I made it, and I’m glad I did, because this is one of those novels that falls into place once you reach the end. Then I went back to the beginning and skimmed through the whole thing again, going “oh, now I get it.”
The novel opens with a wonderful protagonist, Anjum, born a hermaphrodite, finding a home with a motley collection of transvestites and other misfits in the slums of Delhi. But then the narrative shifts to a different set of characters: Tilo, Naga and Musa, and we have to wade through a rambling 200+ pages with shifting points of view and a confusing chronology, before we return to Anjum, when the arc of the novel finally falls into place.
The writing has moments of pure brilliance, prose so eloquent it takes my breath away, with perfectly pitched irony illuminating the huge social and political conflicts that provide the backdrop to the novel. I learned a lot about Kashmir and the prolonged fighting in that region. And I am very sympathetic to Roy’s political perspective. But there are long sections that seem over the top, just political proselytizing, especially distracting and out of place in a novel that is already hard to follow.
I am glad I finished it, and overall I think there is lot to appreciate here.
Arundhati Roy is a household name, and The ministry of Utmost Happiness, for me, trumps her first book. It is more tragic, more realistic and brilliantly thought out.
Read about half but couldn’t finish. Couldn’t discern the purpose.
It was not an easy book to read, but i could not leave it. I found the characters interesting. I also learned about the ongoing in Kashmir.
I couldn’t finish this book. Got about halfway through and gave up. Meandering and confused storyline, if you could even say it has a story. Hot mess of a book. Cannot recommend to anyone.
Tried to do too much
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The best read of 2018 (so far). I don’t expect there’ll be another book that radically alters my vision of this world we live in, this planet we have such difficulty sharing. If this author didn’t have so many political enemies, her ratings would soar. It seems India has been experiencing it’s own version of a “Spanish Inquisition,” Muslim and Hindu fundamentalists precipitating hellish wars and purges. O, poor humanity!
And yet Arundhati Roy finds characters to love and winds a gorgeous literary narrative.
I wish I knew how to put a copy of my book, “White Monkey Chronicles,” in her hands. She lives in New Delhi. I imagine brown packages from unknown persons would only cause fright. This world.
“There was to be no more of that folksy, old word stuff. No more worshiping of home-grown saints and seers at local shrines, the new militants declared, o more addle-headedness. There were to be no more sideshow saints and local God Men. The was only Allah, the one God. There was the Quran. There was Prophet Mohammed (Peace Be Upon Him). There was one way of praying, one interpretation of divine law and on definition of Azadi…
There is no God but Allah.
There was to be no debate about this. In future all arguments would be settled with bullets. Shias were not Muslim. And women would have to to dress appropriately.
Women of course.
Of course women.
Some of this made ordinary people uncomfortable. They loved their shrines…But the Strict Ones declared that worshiping local saints and enshrining their hair was a heresy.” (pages 326-327)
This is just a piece of Arundhati Roy’s description of the Muslim Inquisition. No country or continent seems immune to this recurrent neolithic urge for uniformity of belief and worship.