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Sly Company Of People Who Care (2012)

by Rahul Bhattacharya(Favorite Author)

3.22 of 5 Votes: 4

ISBN

0330534742 (ISBN13: 9780330534741)

languge

English

genre

Fiction

publisher

Picador USA

review 1: Although this novel reads more like the Indian author/narrator’s travelogue of a year in Guyana (which I suspect it largely is), with little plot and character development until the end, it is still a colorful and fun read thanks to the writing. The historical cultural mix of Asian Indian and African populations, Amerindian tribes, and various Europeans, and the resulting creolish lingua franca, are highlights as the author’s adventures and misadventures unfold in remote jungles, riverine villages, chaotic towns and cities, and sometimes across borders into Venezuela and northern Brazil.
review 2: Supposedly a novel, The Sly Company of People who Care, reads like a travelogue. The narrator is a cricket journalist, who’s taken a year off to go live in Guya... morena, a country he’s visited before, fleetingly, to report on a cricket match. The ‘novel’ is broken into three diverse parts, his exploration of Guyana’s interior with diamond-hunters, the travails of life as an ‘Indian National’ in Georgetown, and the possibly exciting, but mostly uncomfortable love(lust?) story. He has been compared to Naipul but Naipul’s detached, dispassionate style is very different from the lyrical, evocative prose this book is written in. The narrator is tired of his set, uninspiring world and thus when he reaches Guyana he sees in its melting pot of Indians( descendants of indentured labourers who came in the 19th century), Africans who were brought in as slaves and the indigenous Amerindians a remarkable harmony, he loves the ‘epic indolence’ of the place. The language in this book replicates Guyanese patois, and he makes you learn it along the way.It is the ultimate youthful adventure, Guyana almost seems an ‘accidental place’ to him. There are cracks though, the undercurrent of violence in the culture, the rootlessness of the Indians there, the racial conflict. Guyana was no accidental place, it was created by the wreckage of colonialism creating a unique but fractured cultural identity. This is a coming of age novel where a ‘coming of age’ happens because of an abrupt disconnection with the author’s past, his experience of a glorious world where one starts feeling nostalgia for the present. The idyllic world slowly turns uncomfortable and he leaves behind personal wounds for which he can just regret. The last part is also a very interesting portrait of the awkwardness of a love affair.I love the book because it gives you a window into a different world, and is beautifully written. It has inspired me to travel, to disconnect from everything around me( to go somewhere else), and made me think about identity a lot. The journey of self-discovery can be many things, and it is a beguiling idea that the eschewal of home is a way to discover the self. The second way this book inspires is the way it is written. It’s Huck Finn, and Marquez at the same time. His words drip with the sense of the place, there is poetry in his language, and they evoke sounds, scents(especially scents) and colours. I will never write like that, I know, but I can aspire to. less

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