The Life and Opinions of Kartik Popat

by Brannavan Gnanalingam

Kartik Popat breezes through his teenage years despite having no friends. He has no time for his fellow Indians or immigrants. He wants to earn money, without doing any work. He dreams of being a filmmaker, but ends up working at Parliament, racing through the ranks of advisors and party hacks. As the Covid lockdown sets in, he learns that there are more grifts in the world, than doing a half-arsed job.

Mr Popat disputes all of the above characterisations.

The Life and Opinions of Kartik Popat casts a sidelong glare at the rise of wannabe South Asian demagogues in Western democracies, and imagines a version fit for Aotearoa. The novel lampoons the concept of the model minority, as Kartik makes a mockery of representational politics and reacts to the echo chambers and political movements of the day.

304 pages, Paperback

Published October 25, 2024

About the author

Brannavan Gnanalingam was born in Sri Lanka and moved to New Zealand via Zimbabwe at the age of three.
He is a music and film reviewer for the Lumière Reader, Under the Radar, and the Dominion Post, and also works as a lawyer in Wellington, New Zealand.
He is the author of five novels, all published by Wellington publishing collective Lawrence & Gibson which specialises in experimental non-fiction and heavyweight literature.

Reviews

[Ruby · Rating 4 out of 5]

sooooo good. loved so much! genuinely funny and terrifying and sad and illuminating how alt-right circles are born / people get inside of them.

[Josephine Draper · Rating 4 out of 5]

A satirical recreation of the last 20-odd years of politics in New Zealand seen through the eyes of one Kartik Popat, wannabe film critic, chancer and drifter, who falls into working for ‘The Party’, a thinly disguised National Party, as media manager, axeman, fundraiser, and candidate amongst other roles. It’s fun to identify characters and events from real life - Big Boss, Dear Leader and Churchill are all readily identifiable.

It’s quite a hard book to review. Not much actually happens. Its cleverness is in its observations - sometimes bitingly honest. It is also an intense read - long sentences with layered ideas all the way through. Below is an example, where Kartik is considering taking a job in The Party.
It was an appealing idea. I didn’t want to tutor for another year, realising that the kids were staying the same age while I was getting older and I was becoming less appealing to First Years, and plus, the university had since decided not to pay their tutors for marking and preparation as well, simply by cutting their hours again, and I wonder now if tutors get paid at all in 2024, and I should have done some research on this before finishing this book, so some sense of job security would have been good, and it’d finally give my parents something to put in their emails back to India, though I suspected Amma voted Labour and god knows what Papa’s political affiliations were, probably New Zealand First, because Papa would have assumed he wasn’t one of those Asians in the late ‘90s, but they could say I was working in New Zealand’s Parliament, which would have sounded important enough that they could brag to Meena Aunty back in Bengalaru, and she would gasp in jealousy that for once I wasn’t the most feckless cousin, and I could take photos with my lanyard and one day even become a minor backbench MP.

It’s at times painfully honest, hilarious and very clever, and I imagine most of interest to politically aware Kiwis who’ve lived through the past 25 years.

[Jimmylanyard · Rating 4 out of 5]

With its references to film, 21st Century Wellington political drama and Debsoc, this book occasionally feels like it was written for me specifically. Gnanalingam's prose with the excrutiating run-on sentences beloved by those working on Lambton Quay immediately presents Popat as a deeply annoying guy but throughout the book it's unclear to what extent he is self aware and/or contrite. The vast ground this book covers means the narrator is required to often be more reliable than he should be.

It also bumps into the challenge faced by It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia: when your protagonist is a horrible person, how does one frame his interactions with worse people without letting him off the hook? In this case, the book often navigates that contradiction well. I was reminded of another recent book dealing with the rise of the far right in Aotearoa, Byron Clark's Fear. The Life and Opinions of Kartik Popat features none of Clark's handwringing about figures who are simultaneously victims and perpetrators of discrimination and I really admired Gnanalingam in refusing to equivocate. The greatest strength of this book is that it doesn't pull punches, it is never credulous about Popat's behaviour and it always 'goes there'.

[Laurence · Rating 3 out of 5]

a cynical black comedy satire of the last 15 years of NZ politics. Depressing descent into a post-truth public discourse exploited by amoral power hungry chancers. draws a straight line from US and UK populism.

The choice of writing style puzzled and annoyed me. very lengthy sentences with multiple sub-clauses using commas with and/but/so/as/..... to link the clauses. although I got used to it, I was not able to create a voice in my head for our hero .

I would give it 4 stars but for this curious style choice

[Shreyas · Rating 4 out of 5]

Banger

[Lisa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved this book, highly recommend.

[Bridget Latter · Rating 3 out of 5]

somewhat amusing although pretty grim outlook. I could only sometimes get into the rythym of narration

[Sarah]

I am a massive fan of Brannavan Gnanalingam and absolutely love his last 3 novels but I just couldn't get into this, and with the books I have to read piling up next to me I am letting it go.

[Jack Evans · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thoroughly enjoyable read. I’m glad I didn’t do debating at Uni is all I’ll say.