The Ministry of Utmost Happiness: A novel Hardcover – Deckle Edge, June 6, 2017

In this anarchic novel of fragmented, symbolic narratives of India's outcasts, there is the idea of a truly great work of art for the 21st Century, an equivalent of anarchist sociologist Rebecca Solnit's vision of "A Paradise Built in Hell." There are times, especially toward the end of the book, where the narrative itself gains the immediacy and power of its ambitions. There's a taut account of violence, terrorism, and love in the insurgency in Kashmir and a poetic canvass of a community living in a Delhi graveyard, where society's outcasts build a New Jerusalem.Unfortunately, for me and apparently for a good many other readers as well, a lot of the book sags. It feels as if Arundhati Roy does not quite have her heart in it or believe her own idea, and that hollows out some of the writing. (There's even one section where one of the characters, Tilo, with more than a faint resemblance to Roy, speculates on writing a bad novel: she may have sensed that it was not going well.) If this book had arrived at a publisher's from an unknown writer, it either would not have been published or would have been massively edited. The former would have been sad; the latter might have saved it. Meanwhile, for the American reader, there is a lot of vivid and informative writing about India and much of today's world. For some, it would be more accessible in Roy's non-fiction such as "Capitalism: A Ghost Story."

I loved The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy's first novel, and I fully expected to love this one, her second, that was written twenty years after the first. I was disappointed to realize that I didn't.It was not because the writing was not beautiful. Of course it was beautiful. Roy's prose is poetic and musical. It flows, one sentence leading with the inevitably of rushing water into the next.It was not because there were no sympathetic characters. Indeed, the pages are filled with so many sympathetic characters that at times it is hard to focus.Every single one of these sympathetic characters is at the center of a tragic story. There is so much unrelenting tragedy in this book that I began to feel overwhelmed and oppressed by it. And I think my main problem with the book is related to that.The overarching tragedy here that touches every character's life and becomes the theme of some of them is Kashmir. Bleeding Kashmir. That bit of territory that Pakistan and India have fought over virtually continuously since partition. The appalling atrocities suffered by all sides in the conflict - Sikhs, Muslims, Hindus - pile up unendingly.Most of the action of Roy's novel takes place after 1984, after the assassination of Indira Gandhi by her Sikh bodyguards and the resulting violence that wracked the country afterward. She tells her story primarily through the lives of two characters.The first is Anjum, born Aftab. At birth, the child was a true hermaphrodite, with both male and female sex organs. Raised by her family as a boy, she nevertheless always identified as female and when she had the opportunity to leave home, she became a part of a thriving transgender community in Delhi.The second primary character is Tilo, a former architecture student. In college, she was a part of a group of four friends who continue to be connected in later life. One of them, Musa, was her sometime lover, a Kashmiri freedom fighter. She later marries another of the friends but continues to travel to Kashmir to visit Musa, who is in constant danger and must live his life on the run.If the story had maintained the focus on these two lives, I would have found it easier to follow and to empathize with, but the introduction of so many minor characters kept leading me on unwanted detours away from the two heroines of the tale and at times - particularly in the middle of the book - I felt that there was no glue holding it all together and it threatened to fly off into its constituent parts.In describing one of her characters who kept notes, diaries, and memos, Roy wrote:"She wrote strange things down. She collected scraps of stories and inexplicable memorabilia that appeared to have no purpose. There seemed to be no pattern or theme to her interest."That would almost serve as a description of her book.The strongest part of the book for me was the ending where the writer did manage to bring her various "scraps of stories" together into a well-orchestrated and even hopeful conclusion. It was an ending worth waiting for.

This was a sluggish, aimless, and overly ambitious "novel." It seemed to strive toward social and religious commentary, myth, fairy tell, folk lore, fantasy, and novel. The writing was good. Roy knows how to write. She knows how to tell a story. She is very ambitious here. The is a structureless novel, although I would not go as far as to say it is character driven. Characters move around in the ether untethered, popping up here, there. I could not finish this novel, I got about 65% through. I started and stopped about four times, considering what this work was all about. I just could not get interested in the characters and could not gather up the story. I did my darnedest after a month, and now I am setting it aside.

I was very excited to read that Arundhati Roy had written her first novel for 20 years, after the success of The God of Small Things. In the interim time she has written non-fictional, political books which on their own do not interest me. The Ministry of Utmost Happiness absorbed me from the first page and is a stunning account of modern day India told in an intriguing, intertwined way that only Roy seems capable of. She certainly included many political themes BUT modern day India is beset with politics and division and it would be a complete fantasy to leave them out. I loved the way she brought her threads together although I was very confident that she would. I hope she wins this year's Booker Prize with this astounding novel.

The first half of this novel I really enjoyed, the characters, descriptions. It was interesting and magical. However I think it's one of those books that tries too hard to be clever and different and after a time becomes irritating and eventually I lost my enthusiasm altogether.

I read 72% of it as it is for my book group - after 28% some of the sentences makes sense - but it is just lots of mostly uninteresting stuff forever - lots of characters with no link and lots of stories about terrible things - I don't mind telling the truth but in a novel it needs context not just loads of random stuff.I am going to stop reading it as life is too short - though I do hate not finishing a book

I read this as a Book Club choice: we were all excited by the blurb and looking forward to reading it. I was particularly keen, as I'd been to India many years before and it sounded as if it would be wonderfully evocative of my time there.Sadly, after a fair start, it turned out to be a turgid plod through what could have been a good story. Roy did conjure up some wonderful scenes with her writing, but at various points I wanted to scream at her to just get on with it. Seriously, it could have been edited to half the length and thereby turn into a very good book. With a pile of books by my bed, I eventually gave up around halfway through.Of the 12 of us in our Book Club, only four people finished it, and we're all keen readers (but not with infinite amounts of time for reading). I think that says it all really. Our combined score for the book was 2.5 out of 5.

Being a new gen Kashmiri and this being the first book not in my academics to have been read by me, I can tell you, nothing right away. It's a feeling of numbness.Just having finished it and realizing that every line in this book somehow resonates with my daily life, one way or the other, the murder of 4 locals this very morning to the Shiraz cinema still used as an army bunker, the truth I live everyday and the tales of 90s I hear from elders, this book has it all. It makes you live through it with each turn of a page. At one point it just seems -- too morbid to be true but then it is. It is the truth people here have lived and we still do. This book is right in the feels while being real to every detail, even if at one point you go "nah this can't be!" but then it is... I'm not much of a book reader to review a book like they're meant to be usually so I'm just trying to review the emotions this book portrays and I can tell you that every emotion in this book is not just an emotion you feel of some imaginary character unlike most of the books out there, it was once or is now someone's reality as well. That's what when you realise it makes you sad, and eventually numb with each turn of page...