What do you think?
Rate this book
The Book of Chocolate Saints
The Book of Chocolate Saints follows the unforgettable character Xavier and his journey towards salvation - or damnation - or perhaps both. In the swooningly hypnotic prose for which his Man Booker Prize-shortlisted novel was acclaimed, Jeet Thayil paints a hallucinatory portrait of an ambiguous a self-destructive figure, a charismatic contrarian, and a tortured damned artist battling with his conflicting instincts. Vividly set in both Delhi and Manhattan, The Book of Chocolate Saints explores our deepest urges in a novel that is sexy, dangerous, and entirely uncompromising. This is intoxicating, blazingly intelligent literary fiction that will consolidate Jeet Thayil's reputation as one of the most promising writers of his generation.
496 pages, Paperback
First published March 1, 2018
80 people are currently reading
1556 people want to read
About the author
Jeet Thayil
33 books293 followersJeet Thayil (born 1959 in Kerala) is an Indian poet, novelist, librettist and musician. He is best known as a poet and is the author of four collections: These Errors Are Correct (Tranquebar, 2008), English (2004, Penguin India, Rattapallax Press, New York, 2004), Apocalypso (Ark, 1997) and Gemini (Viking Penguin, 1992). His first novel, Narcopolis, (Faber & Faber, 2012), was shortlisted for the 2012 Man Booker Prize and the Hindu Literary Prize 2013.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 29 of 53 reviews
December 5, 2017
Aut insanit homo, aut versus facit. - The man is either mad or he is composing verses.
But what verses, would you say, emanate from the bosom of passion that borders on delirium? What timbre of voice floats in the smoked air held dense between intoxicating fame and inebriating oblivion? What fumes of rage charge the pen that knows its limits like a bird does the sky’s? Ask Xavier and he shall reveal the seething hearth, one ballistic verse (or painting) at a time.
When journalist Dismas Bambai embarks on expounding the poetic scene of post-colonial Bombay in an anthology, he excavates his known and obscure sources to put together the chapter on the Newton Francis Xavier. Xavier is a liar, a womanizer, a consumed painter. And he is also a loner, a masochist, a celebrated poet. Chronicle this 62-year old’s story across India and America, with cultural attendance of Bombay in full glory, is what the book does. Or not?
Against trivializing most women as temporary stops, Xavier’s partner is depicted as a young woman of remarkable fortitude and empathy, albeit not without the occasional chinks in her strong armour. Goody Lol, her name. What’s in a name you say? Ribald humour.
The work is thematically both rich and subtle, cascading over issues of casteism, misogyny, patriarchy, lechery arising out of power, corruption and racism. There is rage, burning rage, and Thayil doesn’t mince words when throwing his acerbic gauntlet all over the 500 pages. His narrative is akin to a ravenous shower of slangs and urgency on the tedium of abhorrent inaction. Page after page after page, it heaps thoughts incessantly, sometimes sacrilegious ones too, and suddenly, comes to a halt. His Xavier turns a raconteur in a world of wily know-alls.
A critique, a tribute, a memoir, a reflection, a satire, a zeitgeist - in galloping brilliance, the chapters coalesce to form a work of wonderful dimensions and perspicacity. Needless to say, despite its length, the book turned a riot!
I must conclude with one fiery sample from this creation.
But what verses, would you say, emanate from the bosom of passion that borders on delirium? What timbre of voice floats in the smoked air held dense between intoxicating fame and inebriating oblivion? What fumes of rage charge the pen that knows its limits like a bird does the sky’s? Ask Xavier and he shall reveal the seething hearth, one ballistic verse (or painting) at a time.
When journalist Dismas Bambai embarks on expounding the poetic scene of post-colonial Bombay in an anthology, he excavates his known and obscure sources to put together the chapter on the Newton Francis Xavier. Xavier is a liar, a womanizer, a consumed painter. And he is also a loner, a masochist, a celebrated poet. Chronicle this 62-year old’s story across India and America, with cultural attendance of Bombay in full glory, is what the book does. Or not?
He had no interest in mimesis. He was interested only in transcendence.The title is an ode to the poets deeply associated with Bombay/ Maharashtra – a kind of a warm induction into the erstwhile world that was pregnant with earthy verses, peppered with humor and yearning for a fairer, progressive society. My reading Dom Moraes two months ago is almost serendipitous as I lapped up his generous mentions in Thayil’s book like a hungry child – somewhere, I saw Moraes being powder-dressed to fit Thayil’s hero (or anti-hero). Arun Kolatkar, Nissim Ezekiel and many others contribute to the core thread of this book which, in form of short poems, unweave the messy patchwork of muted voices and broken relationships. The book also, interestingly, invokes Francis Newton Souza, the artist of post-independent India who garnered global recognition owing to his feral, untamed artistic craft. Fusing the protagonist with the traits of both the poet and the painter is Thayil’s way of calling us into a theatre and showing us a musical palimpsest!
Against trivializing most women as temporary stops, Xavier’s partner is depicted as a young woman of remarkable fortitude and empathy, albeit not without the occasional chinks in her strong armour. Goody Lol, her name. What’s in a name you say? Ribald humour.
The work is thematically both rich and subtle, cascading over issues of casteism, misogyny, patriarchy, lechery arising out of power, corruption and racism. There is rage, burning rage, and Thayil doesn’t mince words when throwing his acerbic gauntlet all over the 500 pages. His narrative is akin to a ravenous shower of slangs and urgency on the tedium of abhorrent inaction. Page after page after page, it heaps thoughts incessantly, sometimes sacrilegious ones too, and suddenly, comes to a halt. His Xavier turns a raconteur in a world of wily know-alls.
A critique, a tribute, a memoir, a reflection, a satire, a zeitgeist - in galloping brilliance, the chapters coalesce to form a work of wonderful dimensions and perspicacity. Needless to say, despite its length, the book turned a riot!
I must conclude with one fiery sample from this creation.
November 12, 2017
I picked this one on a sentimental whim at the airport while returning from a wistful, laid-back holiday in lush and sunny North Goa. The book had the familiar place-names, a casual flip revealed a fair capture of the sights, the sounds of the places I was leaving behind and I was deeply intrigued by the book’s unusual premise to chronicle the forgotten modernist poets of India from the 70s and 80s. What a niche fringe concern for a subcontinental novel, and I took an instant like to this commitment to chart literary artists and bring it to a more mainstream audience. With echoes of Bolano’s The Savage Dectectives, my interest was piqued and I became more curious on the insights and overlaps after seeing Thayil’s past work involving poetry and editing of poetry anthologies on the inside of the book’s glorious hardback jacket.
However, much as I wanted to befriend this big unruly beast of a novel with all its polyphonic, polyphagic grievance for the forgotten martyrs to the cause of poetry, I was unable to lose myself in this world or bring myself to care about the eventual predictable fate of the tracked poet.
As our protagonist journalist, Dismas Bambai tracks this much feted poet-lord, an ambassador of some Hung Realist Poets Society who is on a downspiral to total obscurity somewhere in New York City and is preparing for a homecoming of sorts with one last retrospective in New Delhi of his acrylics and poetry, we only have a succession of clinical transcriptions of material accrued via interviews and brief wandering missions where he gets to meet and greet this ageing poet and/or share a joint or a drinking session. With each passing section, as new material is unearthed on this fast disappearing man, he somehow becomes less compelling and Bambai’s single-minded mission fails to have a hook other than a strange drive to have a compilation of an anthology which will lead to recognition, awards etc. This was not enough for me to sustain my interest, and Thayil does not package this resurrector of little-known literary souls with much personality. There is a stretch earlier on where we see Bambai slumming it in a smalltime South Asian classified-heavy rag production, but none of the attempted comedy or social observation there hit the right notes for us to care for the ensuing 450 pages.
My second grouse is that the character of Xavier in stretches that see him living out his secluded existence in differing and worsening degrees of disillusionment, besides soused in increasing amounts of alcohol and self-pity did not ever become a character who, for all the tortured greatness of his poems suggested by the breathless tracking by Bambai, I could empathise with. He peaked early, was celebrated for a bit, had his moment, fell out of times and favours, and not surprisingly, languished. For all intents and purposes, he still fared better than some of his more anonymous colleagues (not least the Untouchable Poet who never even got the spotlight!). I am afraid but seeing him alternatingly boast and fuss around women, alcohol and the glories past made me roll my eyes after a stretch (the length of this book does it few favours) and I could not find an emotional inroad to summon sympathy for his fractured soul.
The whole rambling resurrection project of these poets, for me, needed some more heart and more imagination to bind some part of us humbler non-poetic mortals to the epic disillusionment that plagues Xavier and his ilk. This failure, either mine (to decipher) or Thayil’s (to deliver) meant the novel’s straight-written parts were a total drag. This coupled with frustrating digressions (like in the first third, the whole bit where we get a Sikh immigrant being chased in a surreal scene post 9/11: juxtaposing tortured-artist angst on top of unasked-for immigrant-post 9/11 angst was unintentionally hilarious). I also felt uncertain about the various drug-addled trips and hallucinogenic rants that Thayil staged: they never quite packed the punch and/or were timed wrong and/or added nothing for me.
Which brings me to the stretches I did devour with relish: about half the novel is invested in chronicling testimonies/interviews from people who knew/continue to know Xavier. We have a certified insane clinician-mother, nosy neighbours, models and muses, school teachers, Indian and British professors, arts activists, peers, cultural commentators and many lapsed poets, each remembering their Xavier and the world of poetry around him and them. In the first few stretches, where Thayil is at his best, we have a curious picture formed of Xavier from an introverted schoolboy to a literary contrarian to ace bohemian with his curious, judgemental, oppressive silences on meeting people which are recollected again and again which give him and the book a menacing air, but sadly Thayil doesn’t do much with this. There are some playful scenes where we have him fearlessly drawing Indira Gandhi as a blob of black when he’s commissioned by her team for a portrait or a nonchalant meeting with VS Naipaul at the height of his literary powers or the bit where the Hung Realists found themselves in company of Allen Ginsberg. And I sorely wished it continued thus, part-whimsy, part-impression (almost like the recently feted Lincoln in the Bardo) where reminiscences and written documents hint at a person who would have lived with more experimental ways to throw insight into the poetic process and progress.
Regardless of my reservations about its success as a novel, I admired at an intellectual level its freshness in inciting a conversation about forgotten literary figures: these renegade poets living in some forgotten anarchic universe of their own making. Thayil goes to some length to bring to us these people from beyond the remote corners of literati chambers for which I am grateful. I would have liked it to be less opaque, more accessible, and its consistent rain of nihilistic spikes tempered suitably to make it less prickly and less daunting to revisit the people it so liberally name-drops and celebrates. It would also have helped bridge the interminable gulf from which a reader who is functional in the society could view these poets as the sensitive brothers and sisters who fall between the cracks in a world churning fast than the unpleasant, entitled as*holes who got tangled in trying to make too much sense of the fickleness and the chaos of the world around them.
The book enkindles the chaos and cruelty of the subcontinent’s streets that once inspired poetry from a society of subcontinent’s very own chocolate saints who later went on to rot. Through these savants of the written word, he inserts a worry about the longevity of art, the value of monk-like pursuing of self-expression and the place of poetry in a fast shifting world. But this experimental semi-fictional odyssey is only for the ones who are initiated or most committed to its cause.
However, much as I wanted to befriend this big unruly beast of a novel with all its polyphonic, polyphagic grievance for the forgotten martyrs to the cause of poetry, I was unable to lose myself in this world or bring myself to care about the eventual predictable fate of the tracked poet.
As our protagonist journalist, Dismas Bambai tracks this much feted poet-lord, an ambassador of some Hung Realist Poets Society who is on a downspiral to total obscurity somewhere in New York City and is preparing for a homecoming of sorts with one last retrospective in New Delhi of his acrylics and poetry, we only have a succession of clinical transcriptions of material accrued via interviews and brief wandering missions where he gets to meet and greet this ageing poet and/or share a joint or a drinking session. With each passing section, as new material is unearthed on this fast disappearing man, he somehow becomes less compelling and Bambai’s single-minded mission fails to have a hook other than a strange drive to have a compilation of an anthology which will lead to recognition, awards etc. This was not enough for me to sustain my interest, and Thayil does not package this resurrector of little-known literary souls with much personality. There is a stretch earlier on where we see Bambai slumming it in a smalltime South Asian classified-heavy rag production, but none of the attempted comedy or social observation there hit the right notes for us to care for the ensuing 450 pages.
My second grouse is that the character of Xavier in stretches that see him living out his secluded existence in differing and worsening degrees of disillusionment, besides soused in increasing amounts of alcohol and self-pity did not ever become a character who, for all the tortured greatness of his poems suggested by the breathless tracking by Bambai, I could empathise with. He peaked early, was celebrated for a bit, had his moment, fell out of times and favours, and not surprisingly, languished. For all intents and purposes, he still fared better than some of his more anonymous colleagues (not least the Untouchable Poet who never even got the spotlight!). I am afraid but seeing him alternatingly boast and fuss around women, alcohol and the glories past made me roll my eyes after a stretch (the length of this book does it few favours) and I could not find an emotional inroad to summon sympathy for his fractured soul.
The whole rambling resurrection project of these poets, for me, needed some more heart and more imagination to bind some part of us humbler non-poetic mortals to the epic disillusionment that plagues Xavier and his ilk. This failure, either mine (to decipher) or Thayil’s (to deliver) meant the novel’s straight-written parts were a total drag. This coupled with frustrating digressions (like in the first third, the whole bit where we get a Sikh immigrant being chased in a surreal scene post 9/11: juxtaposing tortured-artist angst on top of unasked-for immigrant-post 9/11 angst was unintentionally hilarious). I also felt uncertain about the various drug-addled trips and hallucinogenic rants that Thayil staged: they never quite packed the punch and/or were timed wrong and/or added nothing for me.
Which brings me to the stretches I did devour with relish: about half the novel is invested in chronicling testimonies/interviews from people who knew/continue to know Xavier. We have a certified insane clinician-mother, nosy neighbours, models and muses, school teachers, Indian and British professors, arts activists, peers, cultural commentators and many lapsed poets, each remembering their Xavier and the world of poetry around him and them. In the first few stretches, where Thayil is at his best, we have a curious picture formed of Xavier from an introverted schoolboy to a literary contrarian to ace bohemian with his curious, judgemental, oppressive silences on meeting people which are recollected again and again which give him and the book a menacing air, but sadly Thayil doesn’t do much with this. There are some playful scenes where we have him fearlessly drawing Indira Gandhi as a blob of black when he’s commissioned by her team for a portrait or a nonchalant meeting with VS Naipaul at the height of his literary powers or the bit where the Hung Realists found themselves in company of Allen Ginsberg. And I sorely wished it continued thus, part-whimsy, part-impression (almost like the recently feted Lincoln in the Bardo) where reminiscences and written documents hint at a person who would have lived with more experimental ways to throw insight into the poetic process and progress.
Regardless of my reservations about its success as a novel, I admired at an intellectual level its freshness in inciting a conversation about forgotten literary figures: these renegade poets living in some forgotten anarchic universe of their own making. Thayil goes to some length to bring to us these people from beyond the remote corners of literati chambers for which I am grateful. I would have liked it to be less opaque, more accessible, and its consistent rain of nihilistic spikes tempered suitably to make it less prickly and less daunting to revisit the people it so liberally name-drops and celebrates. It would also have helped bridge the interminable gulf from which a reader who is functional in the society could view these poets as the sensitive brothers and sisters who fall between the cracks in a world churning fast than the unpleasant, entitled as*holes who got tangled in trying to make too much sense of the fickleness and the chaos of the world around them.
The book enkindles the chaos and cruelty of the subcontinent’s streets that once inspired poetry from a society of subcontinent’s very own chocolate saints who later went on to rot. Through these savants of the written word, he inserts a worry about the longevity of art, the value of monk-like pursuing of self-expression and the place of poetry in a fast shifting world. But this experimental semi-fictional odyssey is only for the ones who are initiated or most committed to its cause.
February 14, 2020
There are some authors who hypnotise me with their writing. Borges, Cortázar, Cărtărescu, Alameddine, Vuong, and now Thayil. In my mind I collect imaginary moments of happiness (next to the real ones I store in my heart) and one of them would be to sit on the floor with all of these writers, in silence, and listen to them converse about literature.
“The Book of Chocolate Saints” by Jeet Thayil is an original novel, constructed of a narrative plot in prose, of poems, as well as of interviews (or rather monologues) of various people, all with their own voice and distinctive personality. All that completes the portrayal of fictional character Newton Francis Xavier, a Goan poet and painter, the co-founder of the Mumbai-based Hung Realists poetry movement. The book spans several decades and evokes, among others, Goa in the 1940s and 1950s, contemporary Delhi and Bangalore, New York post-9/11, as well as Mumbai of the 1970s and 1980s. The trio: obnoxious and troubled Xavier, his uncompromising and fierce younger partner Goody Lol, and oftentimes annoying and gullible Xavier’s biographer Dismas Bambai, who chases the couple in the US and India, are all rather unpredictable, impulsive and very flawed. But who wants to read about perfect characters who never make mistakes? Thayil, not hiding the fact that he himself was for many years addicted to alcohol and drugs, was able to very convincingly depict the states of intoxication, self-destruction and self-delusion, invariably related to addiction. Megalomania combined with periods of self-doubt and paranoia, Xavier’s life-long companions, couldn’t have been painted better.
I read the book and marvelled: there is so much I don’t know! I felt as if I was invited to some secret meetings, during which relationships between various Indian poets I had never heard about were discussed. People lampooned them, talked about animosities and affinities between some of them and took them off their pedestals. I felt honoured to get a glimpse into the realm previously unknown to me. But isn’t it the power of literature - to open new worlds to a reader?
A marvellous, delirious, spellbinding, absolutely unmissable gem of a novel.
“The Book of Chocolate Saints” by Jeet Thayil is an original novel, constructed of a narrative plot in prose, of poems, as well as of interviews (or rather monologues) of various people, all with their own voice and distinctive personality. All that completes the portrayal of fictional character Newton Francis Xavier, a Goan poet and painter, the co-founder of the Mumbai-based Hung Realists poetry movement. The book spans several decades and evokes, among others, Goa in the 1940s and 1950s, contemporary Delhi and Bangalore, New York post-9/11, as well as Mumbai of the 1970s and 1980s. The trio: obnoxious and troubled Xavier, his uncompromising and fierce younger partner Goody Lol, and oftentimes annoying and gullible Xavier’s biographer Dismas Bambai, who chases the couple in the US and India, are all rather unpredictable, impulsive and very flawed. But who wants to read about perfect characters who never make mistakes? Thayil, not hiding the fact that he himself was for many years addicted to alcohol and drugs, was able to very convincingly depict the states of intoxication, self-destruction and self-delusion, invariably related to addiction. Megalomania combined with periods of self-doubt and paranoia, Xavier’s life-long companions, couldn’t have been painted better.
I read the book and marvelled: there is so much I don’t know! I felt as if I was invited to some secret meetings, during which relationships between various Indian poets I had never heard about were discussed. People lampooned them, talked about animosities and affinities between some of them and took them off their pedestals. I felt honoured to get a glimpse into the realm previously unknown to me. But isn’t it the power of literature - to open new worlds to a reader?
A marvellous, delirious, spellbinding, absolutely unmissable gem of a novel.
October 18, 2018
I haven't finished reading this book yet but I couldn't wait till then to write this review as that day would never arrive. This book is long, monotonous and NEVER ENDING! Initially I liked the premise of a prodigy turned tortured suffering artist globetrotting his way through life but then that was it.
The book is about this guy who thinks too much of himself and very little of others around him. Plus I had to read around 200 pages just to extract this much information about him as the book is in the format of his son interviewing people who knew him.
The writing style is not fun to navigate and even though the idea of discovering more about someone through a series of interviews sounds interesting, it is not. Or maybe it wasn't executed well. Either way, this is a book I'd recommend skipping.
The book is about this guy who thinks too much of himself and very little of others around him. Plus I had to read around 200 pages just to extract this much information about him as the book is in the format of his son interviewing people who knew him.
The writing style is not fun to navigate and even though the idea of discovering more about someone through a series of interviews sounds interesting, it is not. Or maybe it wasn't executed well. Either way, this is a book I'd recommend skipping.
March 24, 2018
Read this book. Read it, devour it, dream about it, let the words make its way to every open sore of your consciousness so that it itches at every inopportune moment and you can't help but scratch at it, until you find relief at finishing it all. This book has so much, verses, poetry, absurdly remarkable prose, but the greatest quality of this book would be it's ability to make you want to write. It forces you to pick up a pen and scribble on paper. It makes you want to tell stories the way Jeet Thayil does. It makes you want to flesh out madly flamboyant characters that you know exist somewhere in your head. It makes you want to consume art, human experiences and alcohol in large neat doses. And for a book to do that is something isn't it?
July 10, 2025
This was the kind of book that left me wondering what I had read when I finished all 500 + pages of it!
On an abstract level, I understood what it was trying to say about the central character Newton Xavier, a poet given to eccentricity and an elevated sense of self importance. The book begins with a series of interviews about him where a journalist, Dismas Bambai, is asking those who knew him to talk about their experiences with him. These include his mother, his former neighbour, teachers, other poets and a variety of people who had interacted with him. This is all for a book that the journalist is putting together.
It moves on to the perspective of the journalist himself and his meetings with Xavier and his partner Goody Lol. It talks about the artist's life and work and intersperses that with the work of other famous Bombay poets and an anthology they all published together. I'm not a huge reader of poetry so my knowledge of it is not that advanced but I recognised some of the names mentioned and it was interesting to get a perspective of the poetic scene of the 70s and 80s that the author presents.
Somewhere in the middle, it started meandering too much in terms of going off on tangents about people Xavier and Goody meet and telling their stories. In between there are references to the chocolate saints(non-white saints deserving to be more known) Xavier keeps talking about and his work painting and writing about them. I couldn't figure out exactly what it was all supposed to mean. That's where the title of the book comes from and it is mentioned throughout the book but fleetingly. We follow Xavier,Goody and Dismas himself from Goa to NewYork and then back to Delhi where a retrospective of Xavier's work is planned just as he's about to turn 66. I confess that I didn't get why he was feted or if he even was and if his personality and his notoriety were cultivated to bring his art to the notice of the world!
I get that this isn't a book that flows linearly from beginning to end with a plot but I still wish I could have grasped more of what it was about! The character of the artist and Goody and their relationship that is on and off and plagued by infidelity and even disinterest at times got monotonous after a while. There was no clear picture of where exactly it was heading. It seemed more like a commentary on everything around Xavier and his scorn for the country of his birth was foremost! The artist is very far from lovable or quirky and is downright creepy and uncomfortable in several encounters towards the end which I'm not sure even fit into the theme such as it was.The narrative seemed to switch arbitrarily and for such a long book, it didn't have any followable pattern.
Was it supposed to be about Xavier's life as a tortured artist who was difficult to comprehend? Were the frequent segues into other topics intended to enhance our understanding of the main protagonist? Was this a social commentary on the times through the voice of Xavier and his contemporaries? Was it meant to be all or none of these? All questions that I wondered about while reading the book and am still not sure!
Maybe it is just not the kind of book I can appreciate fully or I am not astute enough to understand it, which is why prize winners and books with themes like this one are not my favourite to read. It did feel like the author was being deliberately obtuse to make the book seem more complex and incomprehensible, yet another feature of certain award winners!However I have had much better luck with some of those books in the recent past and so decided to try this one and read it through to the end trying to decipher more meaning. I was not successful in doing that but sometimes you need to try something different from the usual and it was certainly that!
On an abstract level, I understood what it was trying to say about the central character Newton Xavier, a poet given to eccentricity and an elevated sense of self importance. The book begins with a series of interviews about him where a journalist, Dismas Bambai, is asking those who knew him to talk about their experiences with him. These include his mother, his former neighbour, teachers, other poets and a variety of people who had interacted with him. This is all for a book that the journalist is putting together.
It moves on to the perspective of the journalist himself and his meetings with Xavier and his partner Goody Lol. It talks about the artist's life and work and intersperses that with the work of other famous Bombay poets and an anthology they all published together. I'm not a huge reader of poetry so my knowledge of it is not that advanced but I recognised some of the names mentioned and it was interesting to get a perspective of the poetic scene of the 70s and 80s that the author presents.
Somewhere in the middle, it started meandering too much in terms of going off on tangents about people Xavier and Goody meet and telling their stories. In between there are references to the chocolate saints(non-white saints deserving to be more known) Xavier keeps talking about and his work painting and writing about them. I couldn't figure out exactly what it was all supposed to mean. That's where the title of the book comes from and it is mentioned throughout the book but fleetingly. We follow Xavier,Goody and Dismas himself from Goa to NewYork and then back to Delhi where a retrospective of Xavier's work is planned just as he's about to turn 66. I confess that I didn't get why he was feted or if he even was and if his personality and his notoriety were cultivated to bring his art to the notice of the world!
I get that this isn't a book that flows linearly from beginning to end with a plot but I still wish I could have grasped more of what it was about! The character of the artist and Goody and their relationship that is on and off and plagued by infidelity and even disinterest at times got monotonous after a while. There was no clear picture of where exactly it was heading. It seemed more like a commentary on everything around Xavier and his scorn for the country of his birth was foremost! The artist is very far from lovable or quirky and is downright creepy and uncomfortable in several encounters towards the end which I'm not sure even fit into the theme such as it was.The narrative seemed to switch arbitrarily and for such a long book, it didn't have any followable pattern.
Was it supposed to be about Xavier's life as a tortured artist who was difficult to comprehend? Were the frequent segues into other topics intended to enhance our understanding of the main protagonist? Was this a social commentary on the times through the voice of Xavier and his contemporaries? Was it meant to be all or none of these? All questions that I wondered about while reading the book and am still not sure!
Maybe it is just not the kind of book I can appreciate fully or I am not astute enough to understand it, which is why prize winners and books with themes like this one are not my favourite to read. It did feel like the author was being deliberately obtuse to make the book seem more complex and incomprehensible, yet another feature of certain award winners!However I have had much better luck with some of those books in the recent past and so decided to try this one and read it through to the end trying to decipher more meaning. I was not successful in doing that but sometimes you need to try something different from the usual and it was certainly that!
February 25, 2025
There’s an intention here to (somewhat successfully) bring to the fore the (perhaps undeservedly little known) world of Bombay poets, which is admirable, but a male-author-writing-a-500-page-bender-where-the-protagonist-is-a-badboy-poet-cum-painter-who-has-an-alchohol-drugs-women-and-morals-problem has gotta be one of my least favourite genders.
June 13, 2018
Poetry in motion.
Kaleidoscopic, tumultuous, impressive, impressionistic, challenging, fascinating, classy, rackety, squalid, explosive, smart, soulful, The Book of Chocolate Saints really is a remarkable novel. The writing is glorious.
Newton Xavier is a blocked-poet-turned-famous-artist and an alcoholic (don’t let any of that put you off). It was clear from a young age that he was a genius (don’t be deterred). Now he is revered as “a magnet for chaos and magic”. Dismas Bambai, a journalist writing a biography of Xavier, interviews people who have come into the poet’s orbit over the course of his life. Time and place dart all over the place (I did mention it was challenging, didn’t I?) - Bombay, New York, London (fleetingly), Delhi are all brought bustling and bursting into grisly life. At its heart is the story of how genius resides with failing and failings.
Written in Jeet Thayil’s exquisitely readable prose, there are many voices here but they are clearly delineated and spring immediately to life: an arts activist describes the editor of “the shortest-lived literary magazine in the history of short-lived literary magazines” as “the face that would launch a thousand sponsorships”. There’s plenty to think about. A Russian poet tells us: “Caves are about sex of course…” Points like this, quietly made: When the journalist takes a trip to see Xavier’s childhood home, now abandoned and with no commemorative plaque, he is told: “It’s the kind of thing you will see only in India, one of our specialities – dereliction.”
And here is the man himself, the iconoclast Newton Xavier: “The point of art was not to imitate nature but to surpass it. Art supersedes nature…it reveals to nature how small are her horizons when placed alongside the imaginings of a superior mind.” Author Jeet Thayil - superior indeed.
Kaleidoscopic, tumultuous, impressive, impressionistic, challenging, fascinating, classy, rackety, squalid, explosive, smart, soulful, The Book of Chocolate Saints really is a remarkable novel. The writing is glorious.
Newton Xavier is a blocked-poet-turned-famous-artist and an alcoholic (don’t let any of that put you off). It was clear from a young age that he was a genius (don’t be deterred). Now he is revered as “a magnet for chaos and magic”. Dismas Bambai, a journalist writing a biography of Xavier, interviews people who have come into the poet’s orbit over the course of his life. Time and place dart all over the place (I did mention it was challenging, didn’t I?) - Bombay, New York, London (fleetingly), Delhi are all brought bustling and bursting into grisly life. At its heart is the story of how genius resides with failing and failings.
Written in Jeet Thayil’s exquisitely readable prose, there are many voices here but they are clearly delineated and spring immediately to life: an arts activist describes the editor of “the shortest-lived literary magazine in the history of short-lived literary magazines” as “the face that would launch a thousand sponsorships”. There’s plenty to think about. A Russian poet tells us: “Caves are about sex of course…” Points like this, quietly made: When the journalist takes a trip to see Xavier’s childhood home, now abandoned and with no commemorative plaque, he is told: “It’s the kind of thing you will see only in India, one of our specialities – dereliction.”
And here is the man himself, the iconoclast Newton Xavier: “The point of art was not to imitate nature but to surpass it. Art supersedes nature…it reveals to nature how small are her horizons when placed alongside the imaginings of a superior mind.” Author Jeet Thayil - superior indeed.
July 24, 2018
A book pretending to be fiction and full of nom de sequiturs. Why are the dead poets "saint" in the first place is the central mystery. If you savour that kind of weekend crosswords , then this may be just the right novel to scan. Except for Arvind Krishna Mehrotra , the others are apt as cardboard cut-outs. Not to be presented to a sick friend.
December 20, 2019
Very promising from the beginning. But then took off on a different trajectory. Hoping for some revelation, some connection, shelved several times. The breaks didn't help. Interest lost forever. The 3 stars purely for the beginning. 2.5 rounded off to be exact.
April 12, 2018
You’re a critic. There’s no worse thing that can be said about a man.
As I was working my way through Jeet Thayil’s second novel, “The Book of Chocolate Saints”, I was wondering why the publicity and reviews have been a little thin on the ground. In fact, I have seen one short review in “The Guardian”. The quote above appears as the novel comes to a close, a slap in the face for critics.
When Jeet Thayil exploded onto the mainstream literary stage with his debut novel “Narcopolis” his reputation as a hard living former drug addict seemed to overshadow his achievements as a poet and novelist. “Narcopolis” was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2012 and subsequently won the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature in 2013 and most reflections, critiques of the book seemed to focus on the persona of the writer, the drug elements and less on the tale of Bombay. For example, does anybody mention the novel’s opening and closing word is “Bombay”?
“The Book of Chocolate Saints” is not going to change Jeet Thayil’s hard playing reputation, it is probably only going to enhance it, merely through the seedier elements. However this is a multi multi layered work, running at close to 500 large pages, it is a complex story of the fictional poet and painter Newton Francis Xavier, an alcoholic, womaniser, a character who is highly intelligent, famous but with no self-control. It is also the story of Dismas, the young admiring writer who is compiling a biography of Newton (or Xavier, or simply X), in fact two books “two hundred and fifty pages of heft”, are we reading those two books? Or maybe it is the story of Goody Lol, Newton’s latest partner, or possibly the “The Hung Realists” a group of Bombay poets, Newton being the co-editor of an anthology called “The Hung Realists: A Subaltern Manifesto”. Or possibly this is a tale of the “Chocolate Saints”, dark skinned Saints who throughout the ages have been redefined as fair skinned with blue eyes, this includes Jesus. Surely it is also an homage to Roberto Bolaño, the similarities to “The Savage Detectives” are too obvious to ignore, fragmentary, an alter-ego (Dismas is Thayill?), the multiple character narrations and simply the celebration of a literary movement, here we have the “Hung Realists”, Bolaño with the “visceral realists”.
For my full review go to https://messybooker.wordpress.com/201...
As I was working my way through Jeet Thayil’s second novel, “The Book of Chocolate Saints”, I was wondering why the publicity and reviews have been a little thin on the ground. In fact, I have seen one short review in “The Guardian”. The quote above appears as the novel comes to a close, a slap in the face for critics.
When Jeet Thayil exploded onto the mainstream literary stage with his debut novel “Narcopolis” his reputation as a hard living former drug addict seemed to overshadow his achievements as a poet and novelist. “Narcopolis” was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2012 and subsequently won the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature in 2013 and most reflections, critiques of the book seemed to focus on the persona of the writer, the drug elements and less on the tale of Bombay. For example, does anybody mention the novel’s opening and closing word is “Bombay”?
“The Book of Chocolate Saints” is not going to change Jeet Thayil’s hard playing reputation, it is probably only going to enhance it, merely through the seedier elements. However this is a multi multi layered work, running at close to 500 large pages, it is a complex story of the fictional poet and painter Newton Francis Xavier, an alcoholic, womaniser, a character who is highly intelligent, famous but with no self-control. It is also the story of Dismas, the young admiring writer who is compiling a biography of Newton (or Xavier, or simply X), in fact two books “two hundred and fifty pages of heft”, are we reading those two books? Or maybe it is the story of Goody Lol, Newton’s latest partner, or possibly the “The Hung Realists” a group of Bombay poets, Newton being the co-editor of an anthology called “The Hung Realists: A Subaltern Manifesto”. Or possibly this is a tale of the “Chocolate Saints”, dark skinned Saints who throughout the ages have been redefined as fair skinned with blue eyes, this includes Jesus. Surely it is also an homage to Roberto Bolaño, the similarities to “The Savage Detectives” are too obvious to ignore, fragmentary, an alter-ego (Dismas is Thayill?), the multiple character narrations and simply the celebration of a literary movement, here we have the “Hung Realists”, Bolaño with the “visceral realists”.
For my full review go to https://messybooker.wordpress.com/201...
February 8, 2024
3.5 stars. I loved the start of this. It felt fresh and vital and intelligent. I enjoyed the Goan childhood setting and later the introduction to the Bombay poets even if I had absolutely no background knowledge to help me navigate. However you can have too much of a good thing and half way through I started to struggle, especially when the emphasis moved from Newton to the other poets around him. The book (or me - I’m not entirely sure) started to lose focus and parts felt a bit repetitive. So a slightly disappointed three and a half stars but with the caveat that what I liked, I really liked and that it may have been me running out of steam rather than the book.
June 27, 2018
Raw and real. Like the Ganges, revealing beauty and the underbelly of life. Recommended reading.
March 25, 2018
This dive into the life of the Bombay poets was so satisfying. Completely immersive and illuminating. Thayil’s prose style glitters while his sharp philosophical & literary perspective invite reflection on a variety of levels. Read it.
do-not-read
July 3, 2018... i have no words
https://twitter.com/adira_t/status/10...
https://twitter.com/adira_t/status/10...
August 21, 2018
A book that saw me (going) through hard times. To be re-read.
August 13, 2018
Meta-fiction about a couple of poets, and, by extension, a whole generation of poets — the Hung Realists. Part oral history as told by people who knew the poets, and were part of the said generation, part third-person narration following the motley cast. And what an abundant cast it is — created by putting together many real people the author has seen up-close, and his own slices fill up more than one character. There is no one-to-one correspondence between the real people and the fictional, and the real themselves make appearances in fictional garb — without shedding their real names.
No surprise this work is in conversation with Bolano’s writings — The Savage Detectives and its Visceral Realists in particular. The structure and the tone seems to have been picked up from there, and work tells the older one — So, is that how it was in your space and time? This is how it was in mine.
Also, I think, only poets should be allowed to attempt this bulky an opus — after all there love for economy makes even the fattest books breezy to read.
But don’t let this make you think of the The Book of Chocolate Saints as a derivative work. It is not — it is one of the more original novels to come out in a while, a confirmed copy of the original poets and lives the inhabited. It is a tribute to them, while also a critique of who they were and an appraisal of who they could have been. Of course, Jeet Thayil loves these poets, but he also knows that they were hopeless addicts who slipped away from reality when they could afford it, reshaped it when luck favoured them and deserved your ear always.
Is art an attempt by the artist to become immortal? I don’t really think so — immortality is just a side-effect.Death, though, is inescapable conclusion.
No surprise this work is in conversation with Bolano’s writings — The Savage Detectives and its Visceral Realists in particular. The structure and the tone seems to have been picked up from there, and work tells the older one — So, is that how it was in your space and time? This is how it was in mine.
Also, I think, only poets should be allowed to attempt this bulky an opus — after all there love for economy makes even the fattest books breezy to read.
But don’t let this make you think of the The Book of Chocolate Saints as a derivative work. It is not — it is one of the more original novels to come out in a while, a confirmed copy of the original poets and lives the inhabited. It is a tribute to them, while also a critique of who they were and an appraisal of who they could have been. Of course, Jeet Thayil loves these poets, but he also knows that they were hopeless addicts who slipped away from reality when they could afford it, reshaped it when luck favoured them and deserved your ear always.
Is art an attempt by the artist to become immortal? I don’t really think so — immortality is just a side-effect.Death, though, is inescapable conclusion.
February 27, 2019
"We'll all be saints, to quote New."
March 10, 2023
I couldnt tell u what this book was about if u asked. It wasnt for me.
May 9, 2018
This book is all over the place. When it comes to narrative voices, timescales and locations, The Book of Chocolate Saints happily shifts through all of this with some frequency. At times it's elucidating and interesting, so I do appreciate the ambition to be a little unconventional but by the end I grew weary of hearing about the escapades of a wayward and frankly ridiculous main character. I get that he's at the end of his tether creatively and he's not meant to be endearing, but if you're going to write a book, the reader needs to develop an attachment to something. I couldn't even muster up pity or any meaningful emotion for the main character.
Speaking of which, the story follows the life of Newton Francis Xavier, an aging poet/painter preparing for a final celebration of his work in New Delhi. We get to see his inner circle of confidantes and in particular the strange Dismas Bambai, a man who drops his journalistic exploits to write a biography of Xavier, something which features heavily in the book through the format of interviews. Other interesting people in the ensemble of characters Thayil concocts include a religious con-artist, a neurotic editor and a stalker driving around in a van. That was something I did like about the book. There are many characters with the potential be compelling, but I never felt that quite came to fruition.
There are parts of the book which explored certain plot-lines in excess (take Amrik's soul searching in Arizona and his subsequent irrelevance to the story) and more intriguing questions (Newton's upbringing and relationships) which are touched upon but still seem cursory and sparse. Much is also made of the real literary movements that our fictitious protagonist has been involved in such as the Bombay Poets and the Hung Realists and while I did like these historical interludes, they ultimately were so long that calling it that won't suffice. Parts of the book felt like mere recitations of the past which were just dry.
Jeet Thayil can certainly write. At times the imagery he creates is mesmerising and vivid, but this seems to be too rare, and the irritatingly haphazard qualities of this book are simply too great to be overlooked.
Speaking of which, the story follows the life of Newton Francis Xavier, an aging poet/painter preparing for a final celebration of his work in New Delhi. We get to see his inner circle of confidantes and in particular the strange Dismas Bambai, a man who drops his journalistic exploits to write a biography of Xavier, something which features heavily in the book through the format of interviews. Other interesting people in the ensemble of characters Thayil concocts include a religious con-artist, a neurotic editor and a stalker driving around in a van. That was something I did like about the book. There are many characters with the potential be compelling, but I never felt that quite came to fruition.
There are parts of the book which explored certain plot-lines in excess (take Amrik's soul searching in Arizona and his subsequent irrelevance to the story) and more intriguing questions (Newton's upbringing and relationships) which are touched upon but still seem cursory and sparse. Much is also made of the real literary movements that our fictitious protagonist has been involved in such as the Bombay Poets and the Hung Realists and while I did like these historical interludes, they ultimately were so long that calling it that won't suffice. Parts of the book felt like mere recitations of the past which were just dry.
Jeet Thayil can certainly write. At times the imagery he creates is mesmerising and vivid, but this seems to be too rare, and the irritatingly haphazard qualities of this book are simply too great to be overlooked.
November 26, 2017
Praise the broken world for it will vanish in a day and in a day be replaced by nothing.
How can one not pick this book when the blurb starts with these beautiful lines. Jeet Thayil is one of the best writers I have come across. This book It's like a Magic. Loved each and every word of it. The pace of the story is lil heavy but it was worth reading. It took me 4 days to finish this book and I don't regret giving my time for it. Some literature truly touches our hearts and this is one of them. The way all the stories are described it gave goosebumps, The writing style of the author is best, we can literally imagine each and every scenario, the story. The character building done by the author is best, we can feel each character playing an important role on its own. he managed to give importance to each of them. The Narrative style is where I fell in love with this book. Outstanding it is. The tempo of the book is also good as there are surprising elements every now and then in the book. The book also has some beautiful lines which again won my heart. How small lines have big meanings. It's truly #TheLiteraryNovelOfTheYear. The only thing, the book is too long. but worth a read.
How can one not pick this book when the blurb starts with these beautiful lines. Jeet Thayil is one of the best writers I have come across. This book It's like a Magic. Loved each and every word of it. The pace of the story is lil heavy but it was worth reading. It took me 4 days to finish this book and I don't regret giving my time for it. Some literature truly touches our hearts and this is one of them. The way all the stories are described it gave goosebumps, The writing style of the author is best, we can literally imagine each and every scenario, the story. The character building done by the author is best, we can feel each character playing an important role on its own. he managed to give importance to each of them. The Narrative style is where I fell in love with this book. Outstanding it is. The tempo of the book is also good as there are surprising elements every now and then in the book. The book also has some beautiful lines which again won my heart. How small lines have big meanings. It's truly #TheLiteraryNovelOfTheYear. The only thing, the book is too long. but worth a read.
February 8, 2020
3-4* Jeet Thayil-Jazz musician, poet, and novelist. This is his second book and it's a "big book." His first book, https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1..., I really loved. I've never smoked opium before, but I felt like I lived in an opium den while reading Narcopolis.
The Chocolate Saints-revolves around a poet and the group of poets be in India--The Hung Poets--they got the name from Allen Ginsberg and there's a story behind it. more l8r...
The Chocolate Saints-revolves around a poet and the group of poets be in India--The Hung Poets--they got the name from Allen Ginsberg and there's a story behind it. more l8r...
March 24, 2018
A book about Bombay poets and a Goan—by the way of Bombay, London, New York—artist-poet. Part oral history, part lamentation of an era of poets long forgotten, part fictionalization of the misadventures of the writer’s youth.
Come for the poetry, stay for Jeet’swordsmanship (pen mightier than the sword ha!) including a trademark 2page mono-sentence rant by Naipaul in someone’s dream.
Come for the poetry, stay for Jeet’swordsmanship (pen mightier than the sword ha!) including a trademark 2page mono-sentence rant by Naipaul in someone’s dream.
September 1, 2018
I thought this was an ok read but not overly particularly enthusiastic about it.
At times, I found the story a bit meandering. I found some flourishes in the reading but I didn't feel captivated by it, unfortunately.
I did waiver in part between 3 and 4 rating but I felt this was more a 3 star book than a 4 star book.
At times, I found the story a bit meandering. I found some flourishes in the reading but I didn't feel captivated by it, unfortunately.
I did waiver in part between 3 and 4 rating but I felt this was more a 3 star book than a 4 star book.
April 11, 2018
And how much was it worth in the end? More than money, less than time.
-Newton Francis Xavier.
-Newton Francis Xavier.
May 17, 2018
A glorious, dizzying jamboree of a novel. Loved it.
March 20, 2023
This was an experience.
Jeet Thayil’s writing leaves me feeling like coming out of a drug-addled state. Those moments when the state of high is slowly withering away, and one starts coming back to senses - then the engagement and excitement of staying in the state of high appears as a place shuttered down and inaccessible, quite unlike passage of time after a material phenomena occurs, where recall of the past is easy and convenient. This is not just ephemerality, I am talking about, but rather losing a sense of time, losing a sense of how intensely we are focused in quick succession with hyper-active distraction thereby corrupting our formation of linearity.
It’s a state one may come out of experiencing something, but definitely not wholesomeness that could be summarised into a logline. One may hazard the confidence of deriving some profit out of the state of clouded confusion, yet be discontented with the lingering thought of not having made sense of all the parts.
Thayil’s previous work, Narcopolis too left me in such a state. However, this book is atleast not that abstract, and is quite grounded into the real world, thanks to subversive Dismas who goes about chronicling the biography of Xavier Newton - the character who is hard to be put into any single box, and whose incomprehensibility is perhaps the irritant that Dismas seeks to resolve by breaking down Xavier in the written format.
The incomprehensibility of Xavier does make sense to Dismas at places, but Thayil does not seem too earnest to present Xavier as a mystery to be unboxed slowly. Xavier continues to remain incomprehensible, majorly revealed in parts, disclosed through short biographical accounts of those who came in touch with Xavier or were aware of him. At times, Xavier is shone in full clarity, as an iconoclast of what passess off as conventionalism in the ‘bourgeoisie’ society of Indian poets.
Of what I understood, Xavier, was a deracinated poet and experienced the incompleteness that Indians may feel even after reaching enviable pedestals. The incompleteness stems out from the fact that the Indian ‘bourgeoisie’ may have excellent poeticism or literary genius to them, but does not enjoy the validation from the Indian masses because of language barriers. The Indian bourgeoisie primarily cultivates its ‘literariness’ in a foreign language and culture - something Thayil wouldn’t be miserly with in demonstrating his extensive knowledge of, which becomes the very reason for the isolation of the Indian bourgeoisie. On the other hand, to the foreign bourgeoisie circles, all the Indian bourgeoisie ends up becoming are ‘wogs’ - dismissable as undesirable non-whites trying to ape the former’s identity, and lacking the ‘insider’ creds that would make the latter’s literature ‘authentic’ to the former’s culture. It's Gandhi trying to sit in first class coach because he paid for it, but getting thrown out - playing all over again.
This lack of rootedness is clearly visible in Xavier’s self-destructive tendencies, and neither is he attempted to be shown as a tragic hero needing redemption a la devdas. He is admired only for his words and the ways he could conjure viewpoints and perspectives, but equal parts despised for everything else.
Throughout the book, Xavier keeps suggesting that a poem has no meaning if it cannot be used as a weapon. In that sense Xavier’s deracination makes him understand that the sands of time have moved away from his ‘acculturation’ to poeticism. That he will have no place on the stage with the literary geniuses of the future prophesied as ‘holiness’. When future is holiness, someone like Xavier, a thoroughly post-modernist bred, and therefore, a rootless figure has no chance or even willingness to go the whole hog.
While the story keeps you guessing what’s being driven at, to me personally, this book is a celebration of post-modernist fiction’s last hurrah. A terribly unique writing style which fiction lovers may only find to be becoming even more rare in the coming years ahead. It is richly multi-layered and open ended to multiple interpretations, so much so that it drops all possible poses that one could interpret it to be making - perhaps in a hat-tip to the inanity and insanity afflicting those aching for something beyond an unstable sense of personal identity infused by the persistently entrenched sense of doubt and skepticism wrought into contemporary zeitgeist by post-modernist influences.
Jeet Thayil’s writing leaves me feeling like coming out of a drug-addled state. Those moments when the state of high is slowly withering away, and one starts coming back to senses - then the engagement and excitement of staying in the state of high appears as a place shuttered down and inaccessible, quite unlike passage of time after a material phenomena occurs, where recall of the past is easy and convenient. This is not just ephemerality, I am talking about, but rather losing a sense of time, losing a sense of how intensely we are focused in quick succession with hyper-active distraction thereby corrupting our formation of linearity.
It’s a state one may come out of experiencing something, but definitely not wholesomeness that could be summarised into a logline. One may hazard the confidence of deriving some profit out of the state of clouded confusion, yet be discontented with the lingering thought of not having made sense of all the parts.
Thayil’s previous work, Narcopolis too left me in such a state. However, this book is atleast not that abstract, and is quite grounded into the real world, thanks to subversive Dismas who goes about chronicling the biography of Xavier Newton - the character who is hard to be put into any single box, and whose incomprehensibility is perhaps the irritant that Dismas seeks to resolve by breaking down Xavier in the written format.
The incomprehensibility of Xavier does make sense to Dismas at places, but Thayil does not seem too earnest to present Xavier as a mystery to be unboxed slowly. Xavier continues to remain incomprehensible, majorly revealed in parts, disclosed through short biographical accounts of those who came in touch with Xavier or were aware of him. At times, Xavier is shone in full clarity, as an iconoclast of what passess off as conventionalism in the ‘bourgeoisie’ society of Indian poets.
Of what I understood, Xavier, was a deracinated poet and experienced the incompleteness that Indians may feel even after reaching enviable pedestals. The incompleteness stems out from the fact that the Indian ‘bourgeoisie’ may have excellent poeticism or literary genius to them, but does not enjoy the validation from the Indian masses because of language barriers. The Indian bourgeoisie primarily cultivates its ‘literariness’ in a foreign language and culture - something Thayil wouldn’t be miserly with in demonstrating his extensive knowledge of, which becomes the very reason for the isolation of the Indian bourgeoisie. On the other hand, to the foreign bourgeoisie circles, all the Indian bourgeoisie ends up becoming are ‘wogs’ - dismissable as undesirable non-whites trying to ape the former’s identity, and lacking the ‘insider’ creds that would make the latter’s literature ‘authentic’ to the former’s culture. It's Gandhi trying to sit in first class coach because he paid for it, but getting thrown out - playing all over again.
This lack of rootedness is clearly visible in Xavier’s self-destructive tendencies, and neither is he attempted to be shown as a tragic hero needing redemption a la devdas. He is admired only for his words and the ways he could conjure viewpoints and perspectives, but equal parts despised for everything else.
Throughout the book, Xavier keeps suggesting that a poem has no meaning if it cannot be used as a weapon. In that sense Xavier’s deracination makes him understand that the sands of time have moved away from his ‘acculturation’ to poeticism. That he will have no place on the stage with the literary geniuses of the future prophesied as ‘holiness’. When future is holiness, someone like Xavier, a thoroughly post-modernist bred, and therefore, a rootless figure has no chance or even willingness to go the whole hog.
While the story keeps you guessing what’s being driven at, to me personally, this book is a celebration of post-modernist fiction’s last hurrah. A terribly unique writing style which fiction lovers may only find to be becoming even more rare in the coming years ahead. It is richly multi-layered and open ended to multiple interpretations, so much so that it drops all possible poses that one could interpret it to be making - perhaps in a hat-tip to the inanity and insanity afflicting those aching for something beyond an unstable sense of personal identity infused by the persistently entrenched sense of doubt and skepticism wrought into contemporary zeitgeist by post-modernist influences.
May 17, 2024
This is one of those books which would not let you find a balance of perspective towards it. You would either love it for the importance of subject matter (forgotten poets) and absurdly esoteric style of writing or you would absolutely hate it for it's constantly hunting direction of narration and unlikeable unnaturally cynical characters.
For me, the writing was too self absorbed to resonate with at all. At times it almost felt like the author just let his thoughts flow without any sort of structure. The scenes flow like several streams of water poured over a level surface, you have no idea where it would merge and diverge. The language used is deliberately dense and heavy, it did not feel enjoyable, it felt like I'm studying a course book for a Masters degree.
Alright, the story follows a journalist Dismas Bambai (funny name) who is joining the dots of the life of Newton Francis Xavier, a poet turned painter turned alcoholic recluse. Newton worked on an anthology of forgotten Indian poets and that is the only interesting part of the entire story. They may have possibly named every Indian poet of significance in this book. Other than that, I hated every second of reading about this man, he does random things, says random stuff and is always stoned or drunk. Both him and his love interest Miss Goody Lol (yeah, that's her name) are too cynical and far removed from everyday reality or maybe too aware of the ultimate universal truth, who knows, the author did not give them any hinges to latch on to.
Definitely the most difficult book of the year for me. 7 out of 10 people would probably DNF this within the first 100 pages.
For me, the writing was too self absorbed to resonate with at all. At times it almost felt like the author just let his thoughts flow without any sort of structure. The scenes flow like several streams of water poured over a level surface, you have no idea where it would merge and diverge. The language used is deliberately dense and heavy, it did not feel enjoyable, it felt like I'm studying a course book for a Masters degree.
Alright, the story follows a journalist Dismas Bambai (funny name) who is joining the dots of the life of Newton Francis Xavier, a poet turned painter turned alcoholic recluse. Newton worked on an anthology of forgotten Indian poets and that is the only interesting part of the entire story. They may have possibly named every Indian poet of significance in this book. Other than that, I hated every second of reading about this man, he does random things, says random stuff and is always stoned or drunk. Both him and his love interest Miss Goody Lol (yeah, that's her name) are too cynical and far removed from everyday reality or maybe too aware of the ultimate universal truth, who knows, the author did not give them any hinges to latch on to.
Definitely the most difficult book of the year for me. 7 out of 10 people would probably DNF this within the first 100 pages.
Displaying 1 - 29 of 53 reviews