Amitava Kumar

"Airports, Your Honor, are the places where immigrants feel most at home. And also most uneasy."

Entirely agreed.

Alas, that was the one line in the whole book that spoke to me. Admittedly, I went to the library about 2/3rds of the way through and got out three books I'm immensely excited to read, and thus skimmed the last third instead of reading properly, but I don't think I missed anything.

This book had so many things going for it. It has MONTANA in the title. You know what my favourite state is? Yeah, it's Montana. And I'm always up for a good immigrant story. And it's set up in seven parts, all revolving around a girl, and y'know, even that is a concept that's super fascinating to me.

But! It kind of...sucked? There are no moments that are interesting. I was glad to realise a chapter in that it was fiction, which made all the delusions of grandeur slightly more bearable.

Also, majorly explicit content warning! So! Much! Sex! Ugh! Seriously, publishing industry, let's get some content flags 'cause I'll happily live my life without reading about people fornicating in strange mannerisms. Sometimes it can add value, but when it becomes the focal point such as in this, well.

This is what I get for getting too excited about books based on their titles. And what I get for assuming that intriguing copy makes an intriguing book. Sigh.… (more)

Good Lord, what a stinker! From the book description, I thought this would be an interesting story of a young Indian immigrant adjusting to life in the US. What I got was a little bit of Indian history in between the author's sexual experimentation. And believe me, he doesn't leave out any details. I'm no prude; I'm fine with sexual episodes in a book if they are part of the main story. But not when they ARE the story. I listened to the audio version, which probably made it even worse. If this is a memoir, he wrote it for himself, not for other people to enjoy. every time he reminisced about a woman in his past, he inevitably concluded, "I could almost taste her in my mouth." That's really all I have to say, and probably all you need to know.

It was so bad that I tried to return it to Audible, but they wouldn't let me because I had returned another stinker a month or so ago.… (more)

I bought this book almost a couple of years ago – I don’t remember what motivated me to do so – and, seeing it in the to-read list of my Kindle I started reading it – had to do it some time. Since I don’t like to restrict my reading to a particular genre, and since I had been reading a lot of fast-paced thrillers lately, I thought The Lovers would be a welcome contrast. But, after reading it, I feel that I should have stuck to my thrillers… I felt like chucking it in the middle, but it is a small book thankfully, and I finished it with some effort.
This novel, narrated by an Indian student-teaching assistant-teacher-writer in America, is about, I don’t know what! He tells about the women with whom he has had relationships over the years, and the events leading up to his breakup with each, garnishing the account with so many political and literary and academic references that I was left wondering how much of the novel is original material.
Perhaps the problem is with me – I am not intellectually mature enough to understand the concepts and thoughts that lie behind what has been written. So, giving the author the benefit of doubt, I am rating this one 2.5 out of 5 stars, rounding it up generously to 3.… (more)

While it is a dystopian apocalyptic novel, it has the feel of one. Satya, born in India but having lived most of his life in the US, is in a luxurious villa on an Italian island. He is at an artist’s residency where he is writing a novel on fake news. While the novel goes nowhere, and he ends up spending most of his time in despair as he reads the headlines of the news both in the US and India. In the early days of the COVID crisis, there’s plenty of misinformation for him to collect. His wife is back in the US and their conversations seem to go nowhere as well. They just keep rehashing the problems of their nine-year old daughter telling lies and whit works best positive or negative reinforcement. There wasn’t much reason for me to keep reading. The book went nowhere.… (more)