What they said about
THE ALCHEMY OF DESIRE
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‘At last - a new and brilliantly original novel from India.’
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— V S Naipaul |
‘The Alchemy of Desire puts Tarun in the front rank of Indian novelists. I am inclined to agree with Naipaul: his book is a masterpiece.’ |
— Khushwant Singh |
‘One of the most attractive Indian writers in English of his generation, he writes with a great deal of raw energy, inventively employing images which are at once sad, haunting, horrendously comic and beautiful.’ |
— Times Literary Supplement
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IN INDIA TODAY
India Unedited
Tejpal rewrites the idea of victimhood in a country where the deceptions of power know no bounds
- S. Prasannarajan
Elsewhere in the opening pages of Tarun
Tejpal’s new novel, the narrator’s friend,
whose sexual energy is only matched by
her social angst, reads out these verses
from an Oxford anthology of English poetry:
About suffering they were never wrong. /The Old
Masters: how well they understood/Its human position;
how it takes place/While someone else is
eating or opening a window or just walking dully
along. It is her postcoital Auden moment, though
she prefers to call the poet by his first name
Wystan. That sets her apart from the rest of us
who come and go talking of Michelangelo—or
reciting Eliot, or quoting Shakespeare. She is telling
his “phalloo-foolish” friend, the “peashooter”
suffering from “the illusion of normalcy”, that
“the worst horrors take place around us while we
go happily about our everyday lives”. In The Story
of My Assassins, we hardly hear the gunshot that
shatters the idyll of normalcy and sets the pace of
this novel, but we see through the cracks the
horrors from where it originates. It is a world
where life is nasty, brutal, dispensable. Where
power is measured by violence and fear. Where
India is a story devoid of the moral certainties that
propel those who live by, well, Wystan Hugh. In
the pages of Tejpal, it is a story masterly told.
It begins in Lutyens’ Delhi, where the narrator,
an investigative journalist with a struggling
magazine, wakes up one morning to the news of
an assassination attempt on himself. Till now, he
has been in a universe of rhythmic familiarity,
populated by his family of unbearable banality;
his editor and business partner who has the
inspirational aura of a newsroom Lincoln; his
friend who combines sex and sociology; his guru,
“doctor of souls and physician of the practical”;
and his surreal financiers whose driveways are
marked by big-breasted mermaids. Suddenly,
protected by the state, he becomes part of a larger
story with national consequences. He is the
victim, the target, and his fate inseparable from
the geopolitical destiny of his country. In the
courtroom, he comes face to face with his assassins,
five of them—Chaaku, Kabir M, Kaaliya,
Chini, and Hathoda Tyagi, the leader who is an
embodiment of “courage, loyalty and asceticism”.
The novel takes wing when Tejpal rewrites the
idea of victimhood in an India where the
subterranean deceptions of power know no
bounds. As the narrative alternates between the
dusklands of the killers and the urban make-them are shaped to deadly perfection by the
conspiracy of ancestry and the attitudes of a
society that shows no mercy. They are more than
the artists of knife and hammer; they are antiheroes
of detached action, immortalised by police
files. Their stories provide some of the finest set
pieces in the novel, ranging from ritual maiming
to overpowering a King Cobra in the jungles of the
North-east to video nights beyond the platforms
of New Delhi railway station. Tejpal is not picnicking
in the proverbial Other India; he is not romanticising
the essential savagery of the Indian
countryside either. And he is too smart a storyteller
to succumb to the temptations of biography,
even though the narrator is a journalist and the
magazine is desperately looking for a backer. The
Story of My Assassins is an argument with power,
a counter-narrative from someone who has been
chosen by the state to sustain a lie. Four years
ago, Tejpal wrote in his first novel, The Alchemy
of Desire: “You had to find your words. You had
to find your story.” The words here make the story
of India a lot more interesting.
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