Book Review: Narcopolis

Narcopolis: A Novel by Jeet Thayil

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Narcopolis opens in Bombay in the 1970s. The narrator is a frequent customer at an opium den that has an attached brothel. Dimple, a eunuch, works making pipes in the den and in the brothel. The den has other regular customers besides the narrator – artists, family men, and gangsters. Narcopolis follows these characters through the decades as opium gives way to heroin from Pakistan.

This book had a different style from most of the books I read. The writing is dreamily hazy – making the reader feel like what the people on drugs must feel like a lot of the time. The time-line was hard to keep straight and sometimes it took me a few sentences to figure out which character the author was writing about. I think this was purposeful though to achieve the drugged up atmosphere.

Narcopolis starts with a prologue that is one six and half page run-on sentence. This had me a little worried, if the whole book was written like that I wouldn’t have been able to handle it. Luckily, the rest of the book is not like that so don’t let the prologue scare you away.

The author is a poet and that comes through in his prose. He almost romanticizes the era of the opium den. When heroin is introduced to Bombay, everyone’s lives start to fall apart. It’s much more addictive and renders the user much less functional than opium. Everyone lives a life of melancholy and some live lives of total despair.

Narcopolis is not for everyone. If you enjoy poetry and character driven novels you will probably enjoy this book. If you like a straight forward, linear plot than this book might not be for you.

Thank you to TLC Book Tours for providing me with a copy of this book. Here are the other tour stops:

Tuesday, April 17th: The Year in Books
Wednesday, April 18th: Chunky Monkey
Thursday, April 19th: Unabridged Chick
Friday, April 20th: Raging Bibliomania
Monday, April 23rd: The Feminist Texican [Reads]
Thursday, April 26th: A Novel Source
Monday, April 30th: Conceptual Reception
Tuesday, May 1st: A Reader of Fictions
Thursday, May 3rd: Ted Lehmann’s Bluegrass, Books, and Brainstorms
Tuesday, May 8th: Beastmomma
Wednesday, May 9th: Reading on a Rainy Day
Thursday, May 10th: What She Read…
Monday, May 21st: Stiletto Storytime
Thursday, May 31st: Poet Hound

Buy this book at:
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