Split government would present a potential Biden administration with some hard choices about the scope of its own authority. ‘You are doing the operation, or me?’” Ragini interrupts to beg Lovely not to antagonize the doctor; soon, Ragini is dead. But the role of the novelist is to take artistic license, to not just describe how things are but warn how they could be. In today’s India, cruelty has become banal. It's a tricky line to walk, and Majumdar, a Kolkata native who came to the U.S. to study at Harvard and now works in publishing in New York City, handles it deftly, building toward a climax that feels both shocking and somehow inevitable. What the characters do share, not only with one another but with the novel as a whole, is a quality of embodied and astonishing momentum, of exponential change triggered mostly by chance. Jongsu's village is on the border of North Korea, where the air is pierced with shrieking propaganda from a loudspeaker across the hills, creating a sense of emergency among the gentle pastoral landscape, like some attack is imminent, like something dreadful lurks beyond the … The characters appear contrived and lack conviction. Get live Stock Prices from BSE, NSE, US Market and latest NAV, portfolio of Mutual Funds, calculate your tax by Income Tax Calculator, know market’s Top Gainers, Top Losers & Best Equity Funds. Ravi Agrawal is the managing editor of Foreign Policy. At one level, a reader can gauge the crisis the novel as a literary genre is facing by the adulatory reception Megha Majumdar’s debut work A Burning, a ‘new India’ novel, has received in the US. The narration swivels from the perspective of one character to the next, each of whom, by dint of status or sensibility, knows something the others cannot. After all, it is only with the proliferation of cheap smartphones that nearly half of the country’s population has come online. Majumdar cleverly places the smartphone at the center of some of the novel’s key themes. Her book is soaring up the global bestseller lists thanks in part to its resonance with this summer of discontent and despair, a time when public trust in leadership and Big Tech is dwindling. There’s also the politics of publishing—and that’s all the more worrying because it, sadly, threatens to reduce the novel, that greatest form of modern literature, into a neocolonial enterprise. The inequity of the situation is made even more devastating as Majumdar reveals Jivan’s dreams, while PT Sir and Lovely are busy chasing their own. To imagine a better life, powered by her meager salary as a retail clerk and animated by her new smartphone? Lovely and PT Sir both have glancing ties to Jivan: PT Sir was formerly Jivan’s gym teacher, and in turn Jivan was formerly Lovely’s English teacher. And there is PT Sir who was Jivan’s teacher in school. It seems like everyone but Jivan has a say in her fate. Knopf, Megha Majumdar offers an unmissable portrait of modern India in kaleidoscopic debut.
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