Narcopolis - Jeet Thayil
Category: General Fiction
Narrator: Robertson Dean
Tags: General Fiction, Novel, Contemporary, Adults
shortlisted of Booker Prize 2012, Jeet Thayils 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 subcontinents 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 Thayils 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 citys underworld, in particular an opium den and attached brothel. A cast of unforgettably degenerate and magnetic characters works in and patronizes the venue, including Dimple, the eunuch who makes pipes in the den; Rumi, the salaryman and husband
