Review by New York Times Review
THE MINISTRY OF UTMOST HAPPINESS, by Arundhati Roy. (Vintage, $16.95.) In her first novel since her Booker Prize-winning book, "The God of Small Things," Roy explores India's political turmoil, particularly the Kashmiri separatist movement, through the lives of social outcasts. Our reviewer, Karan Mahajan, praised the story's "sheer fidelity and beauty of detail," writing that Roy the novelist has returned "fully and brilliantly intact." WHERE THE WATER GOES: Life and Death Along the Colorado River, by David Owen. (Riverhead, $16.) The Colorado is in peril. Drought, climate change and overuse are draining the river - an important source of water, electricity and food. Owen, a staff writer at The New Yorker, visits farms, reservoirs and power plants along its route, and considers what actions could help preserve the river. WHAT TO DO ABOUT THE SOLOMONS, by Bethany Ball. (Grove, $16.) A financial scandal threatens to upend the branches of a Jewish family in this wry debut novel. When Marc, an Israeli transplant in Los Angeles, is implicated in a laundering scheme, the Solomons back on a Jordan River Valley kibbutz must try to make sense of the news. Balancing literary and political history, Ball renders her characters with sensitivity and strains of dark humor. MARTIN LUTHER: Renegade and Prophet, by Lyndal Roper. (Random House, $20.) A penetrating biography focuses on Luther's upbringing, religious formation and inner life as he articulated his theological arguments and grappled with fame and scrutiny. "I want to understand Luther himself," Roper, a historian at Oxford, writes of her project. "I want to explore his inner landscapes so as to better understand his ideas about flesh and spirit, formed in a time before our modern separation of mind and body." RISE THE DARK, by Michael Koryta. (Back Bay/ Little, Brown, $15.99.) In Montana, a messianic leader plans to shut down a power grid that supplies electricity to half the country, with a woman taken hostage to ensure the scheme goes through. Her captor is the same man that Markus Novak, a private investigator and the central character, believes killed his wife, drawing together a painful personal reckoning and terrorist plot. SURFING WITH SARTRE: An Aquatic Inquiry into a Life of Meaning, by Aaron James. (Anchor, $15.95.) The author, a philosophy professor at the University of California, Irvine, outlines the system of meaning underpinning his favorite pastime. As James writes, if he were to debate with Sartre, one of his intellectual heroes, he'd draw on the tao of surfing: its ideas about freedom, power, happiness and control.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [August 30, 2019]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Roy lit up the literary cosmos with her first novel, The God of Small Things (1997), a Man Booker Prize winner that continues to be avidly read and cherished the world over. In the intervening 20 years, the exceptionally talented, caring, and intrepid Roy devoted herself to social activism while writing numerous articles and five books of inquisitive, finely crafted nonfiction. She also worked on her second novel, which is her second masterpiece. As the ironic title suggests, this is a saga of eviscerating social critique and caustic humor, but it is also a deeply tragic and profoundly beautiful book in its linguistic chiaroscuro. As her intriguingly complex characters endure terror and absurdity, treachery and wonder, tyranny and passion, Roy explicates the horrific conflicts roiling twenty-first-century India and brutally occupied Kashmir. But as specific as her unnerving dramatization is of the dire clashes between Hindus and Muslims over faith, territory, and justice, her depiction of the consequences of extreme ideologies, systemic corruption, and rampant violence is of universal resonance. The unifying force in this tale of suffering, sacrifice, and transcendence is Anjum, a hermaphrodite who lives as a woman in New Delhi, initially as a glamorous standout among the transgender Hijra, a group with a long, fascinating history in South Asia. After barely surviving anti-Muslim atrocities fueled by 9/11, Anjum retreats to a graveyard, where she cobbles together a sanctuary she calls the Jannat (which translates as paradise) Guest Home and Funeral Services. There a foundling brings together Anjum and her enclave and a quartet of friends and lovers who met in college. Artist Tilottama, like Roy, is the daughter of a divorced Syrian Christian mother. Biplab became a high-ranking Indian intelligence officer; Musa, a daring Kashmiri freedom fighter and master of disguises; and Naga, a famous journalist. Each of three men loves Tilottama, and all four are under threat from Amrik Singh, a cold-blooded Indian army officer tagged as the Butcher of Kashmir. From Anjum's cemetery refuge to a small Delhi apartment, a movie theater turned into a torture facility, a Kashmiri houseboat, and the jungle hideouts of Maoist rebels, Roy's entrancing, imaginative, and wrenching epic exposes relentless strategies of oppression, including the abuse and murder of innocents, the cynical lies of counterinsurgency efforts, the infrastructure of impunity, and the commodification of trauma in the supermarket of grief. Roy joins Dickens, Naipaul, García Márquez, and Rushdie in her abiding compassion, storytelling magic, and piquant wit as she questions our perceptions of gender, family, home, country, war, freedom, love, and death in this righteous and tender illumination of humankind's paradoxical capacities for cruelty and kindness.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Twenty years after the publication of The God of Small Things, Roy proves once again that she is a master writer; unfortunately, she is not a master audiobook narrator. The book tells the stories of two protagonists: Anjum, born intersex but raised as a male and now living as a woman in a house with other hijra in Delhi, and Tilo, a politically minded young woman romantically entangled with three men. The two stories are set against a wide-ranging portrait of the social and political fabric of modern India. Yet much of both characters' complexity gets lost in Roy's reading. Roy works too hard at carefully pronouncing every word. This slows the pace of the narrative and so focuses the listener's attention on each word that the meaning of the sentence is lost. While she can be quite dramatic when quoting one of her characters, she drops her voice at the end of almost every sentence, creating a painfully monotonous rhythm. Roy's poetic language and her quirky metaphors and similes remain hallmarks of her remarkable writing style, and she is rightfully known for those rather than for her abilities as a narrator. A Knopf hardcover. (June) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Roy's 1997 Man Booker Prize-winning debut, The God of Small Things, made her an international superstar. Twenty years later, Delhi-based Roy is an activist power-house-feted and feared-with an expansive list of nonfiction credits; her second novel should placate her besotted groupies who made Ministry a best seller even before its publication date. Roy's most ardent fans will want to indulge in the audio version, as Roy narrates with her softly accented, rolling voice, adding another layer of intimacy not achievable on the printed page (or screen). The story is dually centered on Anjum, born intersex, raised a boy, who in adulthood is a woman whose greatest joy (and heartbreak) is motherhood; and Tilo, an enigmatic wanderer whose emotional entanglements become life-and-death challenges. "What is the acceptable amount of blood for good literature?" Tilo reads in her journal-like book from her past. Indeed, happiness remains elusive, while violence is too often mundane. The narrative meanders nonlinearly with multiple spurs, beginning and ending in a graveyard. Roy's socio-political work has clearly informed her fiction: historical responsibility, separatism, poverty, gender politics, terrorism, societal degradation, and more-they are all here. VERDICT At more than 16 hours, Ministry requires commitment and patience, but eager readers will demand access at libraries nationwide. ["Roy looks unflinchingly at brutal poverty, human cruelty, and the absurdities of modern war; somehow, she turns it into poetry": LJ 6/15/17 starred review of the Knopf hc.]-Terry Hong, -Smithsonian -BookDragon, Washington, DC © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
The first novel in 20 years from Roy (The God of Small Things, 1997, etc.) and a book worth the wait: a humane, engaged tale of love, politics, and no small amount of suffering. Who is the fairest of them all, Anjum or Tilottama? Both are beautiful, each in her own way, but time has not been kind to either. Born with both male and female genitals and likened to the disappearing corpse-cleaning vultures of India, Anjum lives among ghosts, while Tilo has been caught up in an independence movement and risks execution at the hands of a coldly technocratic army officer. Roy's latest begins as a near fairy tale that soon turns dark, full of characters and their meetings, accidental and orchestrated alike, in the streets, rooming houses, and business offices of Delhi: school friends become partners in political crime, lovers become strangers to one another. Of one such pair, Roy writes, "He, a revolutionary trapped in an accountant's mind. She, a woman trapped in a man's body." But, Roy tells us, identities are what we make of them; in an early scene, the mother of a child the other children taunt as "She-He, He-She Hee!" seeks guidance in a temple consecrated to a Jewish merchant who moved from Armenia to Delhi, converted to Islam, and ended life dangerously committing blasphemy by virtue of his uncertainty about the nature of God. So it is with all the people of Roy's book, each trying to live right in this world of "fucked-up unexpectedness." Roy's novel shows clear kinship with Gabriel Garca Mrquez's Hundred Years of Solitude, a story that, like hers, begins and ends with death; the first and last place we see here is a cemetery. But there are other echoes, including a nicely subtle nod to Salman Rushdie, as Roy constructs a busy world in which characters cross boundaries of ethnicity, religion, and gender to find, yes, that utmost happiness of which the title speaks. An assured novel borne along by a swiftly moving storyline that addresses the most profound issues with elegant humor. Let's hope we won't have to wait two decades for its successor. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
