A Burning
Personally, I found this novel filled with cliched, cardboard cut-out characters that do appear to appeal to non-Indian audiences in particular. [An example review from Amazon: “My primary thought as I read it was, ‘I’m so thankful to live in the USA!’ The lifestyles of India portrayed in this book are sad, poor and hopeless.”]
In the author’s defense, the main characters are extremely difficult ones to write about (in particular, a Muslim dalit woman, and a hijra aka a transgender woman) and the setting for a considerable portion of the novel (an Indian prison) isn’t easy to write about either. The characters read like they’ve been written based on standard newspaper articles of folks in those situations that we in India tend to read about. But my bigger issue with the novel is that it so easily falls into superficiality of “the man” being evil & does bad things, even when oblivious of his privilege, while “the common person” and especially “the marginalized” suffer. Not enough of their incentives are explored; the world isn’t richly imagined or explained; and the characters are presented as simpletons (unwittingly, I believe, because it doesn’t appear to have been done for comedic effect).
It’s a very quick read, and in that sense I commend the author’s writing style, but with so much incredible literature out there it is difficult to recommend.
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