rating - not worth the bother
an interesting mish-mash of a story, the immortals has the power to be a solid page turner but lacks the finesse and the attention to detail of an actually well-written book. amish tripathi has created a massive world, populated it with incredible characters and filled his script with twisty sub-plots. and that's all good.
it's what he's left out of this book that really makes this such a damp squib. he forgot to put in the research into harappan society, ancient vedic hinduism, the indian calendars and a whole host of such areas. the book seems to be written for ignorant western readers who would not know the difference between the aryan and the harappan cultures, who wouldn't know hindi from sanskrit or prakrit. this isn't a minor flaw. any piece of fiction is allowed to reference events, characters or phenomena from the real world but those references will need to be consistent with the reader's pre-existing knowledge of those phenomena, characters or events. so when r.k. narayan refers to every-day life in malgudi, while the town is entirely fictional, the environment feels realistically like something from a pre-independence town near mysore. when j.k. rowling refers to the muggle-london, it seems exactly like the london you and i know. the alternative is to go the j.r.r tolkien way and to create entirely new worlds, languages, races and even number systems. amish trivedi chooses to use hindu mythology, indian history and language so inconsistently that everything will seem fundamentally wrong to any reader familiar with these topics.
as if this weren't enough, this particular blend of science fiction and mythology lacks the subtlety of ramayan 3392 a.d. and the coherence of a subhash ghai film. this book has taken a magnificent setting, incredible characters and delivered such pointless nonsense, it makes you sad. all in all: badly researched, badly planned and badly written.
book review - the secret of the nagas
1 comments:
An enjoyable read The Immortals of Meluha by Amish . loved the way you wrote it. I find your review very genuine and original, this book is going in by "to read" list.
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