The Ministry of Utmost Happiness
National Bestseller
Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize
One of the Best Books of the Year: The Washington Post * The Boston Globe * Minneapolis Star Tribune * NPR * Newsday * The Guardian * Financial Times * The Christian Science Monitor
The Ministry of Utmost Happiness takes us on an intimate journey across the Indian subcontinent—from the cramped neighborhoods of Old Delhi and the roads of the new city to the mountains and valleys of Kashmir and beyond, where war is peace and peace is war. Braiding together the lives of a diverse cast of characters who have been broken by the world they live in and then rescued, patched together by acts of love—and by hope, here Arundhati Roy reinvents what a novel can do and can be.
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Community Reviews
This book has been sitting at the bottom of my TBR pile some time after it’s release. Unlike a lot of it’s readers, I knew nothing of Arundhati Roy’s previous success. I just heard “LGBTIQ+ Representation,” “India,” and “Man Booker Finalist” and that’s really all I needed from there. Of course, just because a book has positive allocates doesn’t mean it’s actually a good book. That is left up to the reader, and I must say… if GoodReads’ reviews are anything to go by, the readers really didn’t like this book. This honestly surprised me, but then again, it kinda didn’t either.
If a lot of the readers are coming from her previous successful novel, The God of Small Things, which I haven’t yet read and so I have nothing to compare this book to except it’s self.
This book was incredibly difficult to read. On that, nearly everyone can agree. If I wasn’t listening to the audio book, I might have bailed on it a lot sooner like most people, or it would have been a millstone that took me 6 months to finish. It’s long, tedious, and there are a lot of characters who are either coming or going – it’s really difficult to tell which. I think we all can agree that it went over everyone’s heads most of the time. Ms. Roy very intentionally made it difficult to see the forest for the trees, as it were. This book is like a bowl of noodles – there are a lot of seemingly false starts and no clear direction. Frustrating as it was to read, I do respect her for this. I like a little chaos now and then. There are a lot of characters that are introduced in great detail, and then dropped as though forgotten. And then there are others who spring back in at random (and you’re grateful you’d been paying attention). Again, I think this is interesting. As a reader of a lot of tropey fiction, I place a lot of value in fully realized back ground characters.
It is a Picaresque novel, I believe, or at least it has some of the elements of one even if it isn’t a true picaresque. So, there is no plot or very much character development. It’s dark and prickly, but obviously satirical and I did laugh out loud a few times. What made it so especially inscrutable for me is that, while I was thrilled to get a chance to read a very Indian novel by a Indian woman, I had to admit that I was completely out of my element. I had to be honest with myself upon reading this book that I honestly knew next to nothing about true Indian culture. I knew very little about the types of characters Roy was satirizing. I thought I knew something of Indian religions and life, when really I knew about them and only very little. Truly, it’s possible that this was the first time I’ve ever really read real Indian fiction. I didn’t even know enough about the culture to be offended by any of it. This isn’t a great novel to start with that cultural education unless you learn best by having someone drop you directly into the deep end of the pool.
So while I had been challenged by this difficult book, I still have a favorable opinion of it. I may not been very knowledgeable about modern India before or after reading this book, and she did very intentionally make this a murky novel, I at least think I understood the author’s intent enough to respect her work and see that she is a brilliant writer. I’m self-aware enough to understand that my experience with this book was restrained by my own limitations and knowledge.
If you enjoyed this review, you can find it and others like it here
If a lot of the readers are coming from her previous successful novel, The God of Small Things, which I haven’t yet read and so I have nothing to compare this book to except it’s self.
This book was incredibly difficult to read. On that, nearly everyone can agree. If I wasn’t listening to the audio book, I might have bailed on it a lot sooner like most people, or it would have been a millstone that took me 6 months to finish. It’s long, tedious, and there are a lot of characters who are either coming or going – it’s really difficult to tell which. I think we all can agree that it went over everyone’s heads most of the time. Ms. Roy very intentionally made it difficult to see the forest for the trees, as it were. This book is like a bowl of noodles – there are a lot of seemingly false starts and no clear direction. Frustrating as it was to read, I do respect her for this. I like a little chaos now and then. There are a lot of characters that are introduced in great detail, and then dropped as though forgotten. And then there are others who spring back in at random (and you’re grateful you’d been paying attention). Again, I think this is interesting. As a reader of a lot of tropey fiction, I place a lot of value in fully realized back ground characters.
It is a Picaresque novel, I believe, or at least it has some of the elements of one even if it isn’t a true picaresque. So, there is no plot or very much character development. It’s dark and prickly, but obviously satirical and I did laugh out loud a few times. What made it so especially inscrutable for me is that, while I was thrilled to get a chance to read a very Indian novel by a Indian woman, I had to admit that I was completely out of my element. I had to be honest with myself upon reading this book that I honestly knew next to nothing about true Indian culture. I knew very little about the types of characters Roy was satirizing. I thought I knew something of Indian religions and life, when really I knew about them and only very little. Truly, it’s possible that this was the first time I’ve ever really read real Indian fiction. I didn’t even know enough about the culture to be offended by any of it. This isn’t a great novel to start with that cultural education unless you learn best by having someone drop you directly into the deep end of the pool.
So while I had been challenged by this difficult book, I still have a favorable opinion of it. I may not been very knowledgeable about modern India before or after reading this book, and she did very intentionally make this a murky novel, I at least think I understood the author’s intent enough to respect her work and see that she is a brilliant writer. I’m self-aware enough to understand that my experience with this book was restrained by my own limitations and knowledge.
If you enjoyed this review, you can find it and others like it here
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