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50books_poc2009-01-30 05:58 pm
rydra_wong) wrote in 50books_poc2009-01-30 05:58 pm
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Londonstani, by Gautam Malkani
A few days ago, I hit the last pages of this book, shrieked, blushed bright red with chagrin and glee, then ran around the house cackling maniacally. It's brilliant.
Malkani reminds me a lot of Minister Faust (minus the sf/f geekiness).
He's got some of the same high-octane verbal briliance and satirical vigour, and (like Faust) is one of the few writers who can get away with phonetic dialect without making me hurl the book across the room. Londonstani's got a definite South London accent, not to mention a gleefully foul mouth, with textspeak, slang, Hindi, Punjabi, and the occasional spasm of Take That lyrics mixed in.
Like Faust, Malkani's also working complex meta games, and beneath the broad comedy and melodramatic plot, there are some very disturbing and twisty things going on (this is not a book to read if you're sensitive to violence or self-harm, just for starters).
I could say that it's about British Asian youth culture, about the pursuit of authenticity, about tradition and rebellion -- I could even say that it's about cultural appropriation -- and none of those would quite do it justice.
A succession of scenes turn into elaborate bait-and-switches, revealing halfway through that the reader's been carefully wrong-footed. And the last reveal seems as if it should pull the rug out from under everything, but turns out on reflection to be more like a conjurer whipping a tablecloth out from underneath a load of crockery without disturbing a single piece.
Which is, I suspect, entirely the point.
Malkani reminds me a lot of Minister Faust (minus the sf/f geekiness).
He's got some of the same high-octane verbal briliance and satirical vigour, and (like Faust) is one of the few writers who can get away with phonetic dialect without making me hurl the book across the room. Londonstani's got a definite South London accent, not to mention a gleefully foul mouth, with textspeak, slang, Hindi, Punjabi, and the occasional spasm of Take That lyrics mixed in.
Like Faust, Malkani's also working complex meta games, and beneath the broad comedy and melodramatic plot, there are some very disturbing and twisty things going on (this is not a book to read if you're sensitive to violence or self-harm, just for starters).
I could say that it's about British Asian youth culture, about the pursuit of authenticity, about tradition and rebellion -- I could even say that it's about cultural appropriation -- and none of those would quite do it justice.
A succession of scenes turn into elaborate bait-and-switches, revealing halfway through that the reader's been carefully wrong-footed. And the last reveal seems as if it should pull the rug out from under everything, but turns out on reflection to be more like a conjurer whipping a tablecloth out from underneath a load of crockery without disturbing a single piece.
Which is, I suspect, entirely the point.
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