Lee, the Chinese refugee and businessman and a cast of poets, prostitutes, pimps, and gangsters.ĭecades pass to reveal a changing Bombay, where opium has given way to heroin from Pakistan and the city's underbelly has become ever rawer. A cast of unforgettably degenerate and magnetic characters works in and patronizes the venue, including Dimple, the eunuch who makes pipes in the den Rumi, the salaryman and husband whose addiction is violence Newton Xavier, the celebrated painter who both rejects and craves adulation Mr.
Narcopolis opens in Bombay in the late 1970s, as its narrator first arrives from New York to find himself entranced with the city's underworld, in particular an opium den and attached brothel. Written in Thayil's poetic and affecting prose, Narcopolis charts the evolution of a great and broken metropolis. Above all, it is a fantastical portrait of a beautiful and damned generation in a nation about to sell its soul. Burroughs or Baudelaire than with the subcontinent's familiar literary lights.
This is a book about drugs, sex, death, perversion, addiction, love, and god, and has more in common in its subject matter with the work of William S. Jeet Thayil's luminous debut novel completely subverts and challenges the literary traditions for which the Indian novel is celebrated.
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