This is my favorite book that we have read by far. It is just such a technically amazing feat to write a book were nothing happens. It remains unique for me yet it is strikingly like Henry Miller (though decidedly less arrogant). At times I felt as bored reading it as Agastya is in Manda. It shares Miller’s obsession with where the next meal is coming from, sex, and irreverence. None of these really “belong” in literature, maybe sex but not masturbation and unspoken oppressive sexual frustration. This whole story is marked by a down and out sense of drowning in a sea of boredom and an spiteful apathy that thinks swimming is useless. This book has an amazing ability to pull you into its affective movements.
If it was all ennui I would have stopped reading but it has two redeeming graces (if you can use that world in relation to such an amoral book). First the humor is so cutting almost surgically dark and oh so subtle. It isn’t cute but the intelligent and sustained wit of satire that blends jest with desperate sincerity. I think a good early example is Shanakar and Shiv relationship and Agastya’s notion that he had encountered a form of insanity precluded by extreme boredom (30). The absurd and satirical are still to close to the meaninglessness of the novel thought.
There is a second thing that makes the read worth all the boredom: the glimpse we get into Agastya’s innerworld. These flights of unrestrained imagination are like gems in the muck of Agastya’s attitude. It is not that they are always uplifting notion often they are wounding but they make you love Agastya. Such moments are rare in the beginning of the novel and mostly reside in the last ¼ but a few key example is the ideal of Agastya’s three separate lives especially the secret life (48). I also like the goal of being a male stray dog. Another gem, I can’t find the page though, is the remembrance of a line from English class. Agastya muses he “should have been the pair of ragged claws scuttling across the bottom of silent seas.” I looked it up and it is an Elliot quote from “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” There is another quote from Baudelaire, “An oasis of terror in a desert of boredom.” It isn't in the book up it sure sums up Agastya.
Bringing up all of the allusions demonstrates the careful composition of this narrative in spite of its ability to seem like a swamp of mundane occurrences. I too love the moments where the reader gets a chance to hear some of the imaginative leaps that Agastya's mind will take in perceiving the objects around him. I continue wondering why it is that a character with such fantastic musings allows himself to become stuck in the muck of everyday trivialities. Marcus Aurelius, is this really the only book you could get your hands on before you came to Madna? I don't know, Chatterjee writes so beautifully that the story line is able to keep my attention, but I am curious for how long it will be enjoyable.
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