Uneven but when it shines, boy does it shine. I went into this expecting dreary historical misery-porn like Pachinko, what I got out of it was what those books are missing: anger. Roy writes with a righteousness and a fury, and dare I say a black humor. At no point does Roy wallow. That’s the missing ingredient. The problem is she bounces around from injustice to injustice too quickly; please, Arundhati ji, we just got used to this interesting character and setting, focus. ( )

It is hard to boil this book down to a succinct summary. There are two primary storylines. The first is about Anjum, born Aftab, an intersexual individual, reared as male, but who inclines to female. She faces many challenges as a hiira. The second is told by Tilo, an architect with many relationship partners, one of whom is wanted for terrorism. This book hits on numerous social issues in India from partition to present. It is less a novel than the author’s examination these issues.

I enjoyed Anjum’s story. It is easy to empathize with her. If the entire book had been about her life, I would have probably loved it. The writing is solid in terms of the forms of expression, the breadth of language, and flow. This book has spurred me to read more non-fiction to learn more about India’s political situation and internal conflicts.

The structure of this book did not work for me. Tilo seems to come out of nowhere and derailed my interest in Anjum’s story. I could not discern an overarching plot. It comes across as scattered, even rambling at times. For example, there is literally an A to Z list of terms one would find in a Kashmiri to English dictionary. I normally like character-driven narratives, but in this case, many characters seem to exist to serve as illustrations of political points or historical atrocities the author is trying to highlight. I loved The God of Small Things but the best I can say about this book is that it is okay.
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I couldn't get into this. The characters were interesting, but the book just rambled with lots of little tangents and it's hard to keep track of what is important to the plot and what isn't, or even whether there is a plot at all.

Arundhati Roy's second novel, coming twenty years after her Booker winning debut, The God of Small Things, has likewise had mixed reviews. But The Ministry of Utmost Happiness was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2017 and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction in January 2018, so it has admirers to be taken seriously.

In 2020 I retrieved my review of The God of Small Things from 'the archive' and published it here on the blog so you can see that I was not among the naysayers. But in tackling a review of The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, I have to admit that I did not always know what was going on in the novel...

However, I never once considered abandoning it. It is the kind of book that casts a spell on its readers...

I had cut out and kept from the Reviews section of The Weekend Australian Sunil Badami's somewhat churlish 2017 review of Ministry titled 'Voice of Righteous Anger lost in the Indian Crowd', and so I sought enlightenment from it when I got lost after Roy summarily abandoned her central character mid novel. She had launched into a first person narrative without making it clear who this new narrator was. The review confirmed that the confusion was not entirely my fault and noted that Roy 'claims' not to revise or edit her work. Notice that snarky word 'claims'? Interesting choice on the reviewer's part, I thought, but he makes his position (and his Indian credentials) clear:

But given Roy's claims that she never revises or edits her work, many might say that having so over-spiced the masala and having thrown everything into the pot, without tasting it first, she's rendered something, sweet spot aside, is largely unpalatable and ultimately indigestible. (Weekend Australian, July 15-16, 2017.)

Well, I don't agree.

The first part of the novel is narrated somewhat wryly in the third person to introduce the intriguing story of Anjum. Anjum was born Aftab, and after botched attempts by his mother and a dodgy surgeon to render him 'normal', Anjum takes matters into her own hands and becomes Anjum in a hijra community called Khwabgah. She fosters a girl called Zainab but things go badly awry when Anjum gets caught up in the endemic violence that plagues India, and she makes a new home for herself in a graveyard, along with a man who has responded to the violence that befell his family by renaming himself Saddam Hussain, because he admires the dignity with which Saddam met his death by hanging. (The novel is full of shards of detail like this, showing that the whole world does not necessarily view events the way that the west does.) (It is also full of bits of back stories, so you don't necessarily know what's what at the time you'd like to know it.)

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2022/02/06/the-ministry-of-utmost-happiness-by-arundhat... ( )

All India is here: the hijras, the poverty, the middle class, the corruption, the politics, the interminable problem of Kashmir, the double-dealing of the secret service. The confused chronology lost me: we keep going back 20 years, or forward 25 years; one incident is told twice from two different angles. For a non-Indian, people's names are confusing: I would have liked a dramatic personae. An "I" appears in the middle of the book, but is not central to the story. In fact, it's impossible to summarise the story, there are so many sub-themes.