Quiet, beautiful, but hardly the type of book to make a lasting impression on me. This, I've found, has been the problem with many Booker Prize winners--they're either so pretentious as to be confusing and unpleasant ("The Famished Road" springs to mind here) or they're so artsy as to just fade into the background of elegant, almost soporific prose. This one made for a good two hours of entertainment on a Delhi-Bangkok plane ride, but now, only a few days later, I have a hard time recalling the names of the main characters or why I was supposed to care about them. It fits into much of fiction for me that way--I enjoy them while I'm reading them, but months later, when asked if I recommend it, all I can remember is, oh yes, that one was good. Sure, go ahead and read it.
What I really wonder, though, is why choose this one for the Booker Prize? Were there no more energetic books this year? Or was the tripartite America-England-India story line just too good to resist, politically? I suspect the latter, unfortunately. In the end, the America parts were my favorite, and I would have enjoyed more focus on the poor immigrant, finding America far from being the land of opportunity he expected. In any case, the split of the story lines, instead of introducing us to a number of sympathetic characters, only ended up splitting my affection for them--as if I only have so much tenderness I can give to fictional people, and by positing six or seven main characters, Desai reduced the portion given to each of them. What a pity.
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