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mozaikmageOkay SO.
I was expecting Edison to be more of a traditional romance novel, and was already mentally bracing myself for the inherent cringe of the romance novel structure and writing style as applied to A Place I Have Been To Multiple Times. Instead I got something much more expansive, interesting and FUN.
Edison is about this guy Prem who's the youngest failson of a rich family and the only thing he likes to do is sit in his room and watch movies forever. He's soooo miserable and pathetic, everyone is ashamed to be around him, but most of all Prem himself is embarrassed to be the way he is and yet can't figure out how to change it. He tries to make a movie production company, it fails horribly, he runs away to America to try something else and immediately loses all his money and ends up crashing on a mattress in some tiny apartment with a bunch of strangers and working at the gas station down the street. This ends up being the best thing that could have happened to him. He falls in love with Leena Engineer, the beautiful daughter of the local grocery store owner, but her father does not approve of his precious daughter being with a random gas station employee with no ambitions! (They do not know his father is insanely rich.) So he has to make a million dollars to win his future father-in-law's approval, and win back Leena's heart! (Because she could not forgive the way he listened to her father first instead of trying to figure out a way to be together without her father's approval.)
For most of the first half of the book, Prem has no ambitions or goals, and this is frustrating to literally everyone around him. It's a little hard to watch the protagonist be so aimless for 200ish pages, but it works because the rest of the cast is so much FUN. And I think it's only really possible because of how long this book is and the long timescale it spans (almost twenty years) that you can keep track of such a large revolving cast of neighbors and aunties and coworkers and roommates and family members.
It's also really funny-- I was quoting lines out loud to my mom when I was reading on the couch the other night. It's so nice to read a book with actual jokes in it. I feel like recently I've been reading a lot of books that felt like the writer did want to write something funny but also felt writing actual jokes would make it too easy, or something. Not this one though, there's jokes! With punchlines! That made me laugh!
It's also a rare book about movies that feels like a movie without being too self-conscious about its own desire to feel like a movie. I feel like Valente often runs into that, where she gets too into her own voice and overdoes it and it just ends up seeming kind of cheap. Dixit's writing style is pretty plain on a sentence level, but does a lot with its structure. It reminded me of Midnight's Children, but with less magical realism and more extremely well-observed realism. It's so easy to sink into and so hard to put down. I just really enjoyed it all the way through. The love story is dramatic, but not over-the-top about it. Prem slowly growing into himself is so so satisfying! Just watching him transform from someone so desperately afraid of other people to someone who realizes he loves and needs lots of people around him, and who goes out of his way to talk to strangers and make them feel comfortable on purpose, was really nice.
I grew up in the second Highest-Percentage-of-Indian-Americans town in New Jersey after Edison, which is half an hour away from me and which I visit at least a few times a year. Accordingly, about a third of my childhood besties and classmates were Indian American, so I'm familiar with some of the cultural stuff mentioned in this novel via lunch table osmosis. It did feel New Jersey to me for sure. Also I did academic decathlon the year the theme was India, so while the only Bollywood movies I've seen (PK and Three Idiots, the first only dubbed in Russian, as screened to me by my father who is a bit of a "thing, India" guy despite being Russian, and the second once in Russian and once with English subtitles at my friend's birthday party) were made after the time period covered in the novel, I recognized a lot of the Bollywood people cameos in a "Lata Mangeshkar from my Music Resource Guide packet mentioned!" kind of way. I don't think knowledge of Bollywood film is necessary to enjoy this book, but it would probably enhance it. My bestie did say "that's a super Bollywood way to start a story" when I was telling her about the first few chapters I'd just finished, but I mean. I think it really worked.
Anyway, I enjoyed reading this book and I hope you read it and enjoy it too!
I was expecting Edison to be more of a traditional romance novel, and was already mentally bracing myself for the inherent cringe of the romance novel structure and writing style as applied to A Place I Have Been To Multiple Times. Instead I got something much more expansive, interesting and FUN.
Edison is about this guy Prem who's the youngest failson of a rich family and the only thing he likes to do is sit in his room and watch movies forever. He's soooo miserable and pathetic, everyone is ashamed to be around him, but most of all Prem himself is embarrassed to be the way he is and yet can't figure out how to change it. He tries to make a movie production company, it fails horribly, he runs away to America to try something else and immediately loses all his money and ends up crashing on a mattress in some tiny apartment with a bunch of strangers and working at the gas station down the street. This ends up being the best thing that could have happened to him. He falls in love with Leena Engineer, the beautiful daughter of the local grocery store owner, but her father does not approve of his precious daughter being with a random gas station employee with no ambitions! (They do not know his father is insanely rich.) So he has to make a million dollars to win his future father-in-law's approval, and win back Leena's heart! (Because she could not forgive the way he listened to her father first instead of trying to figure out a way to be together without her father's approval.)
For most of the first half of the book, Prem has no ambitions or goals, and this is frustrating to literally everyone around him. It's a little hard to watch the protagonist be so aimless for 200ish pages, but it works because the rest of the cast is so much FUN. And I think it's only really possible because of how long this book is and the long timescale it spans (almost twenty years) that you can keep track of such a large revolving cast of neighbors and aunties and coworkers and roommates and family members.
It's also really funny-- I was quoting lines out loud to my mom when I was reading on the couch the other night. It's so nice to read a book with actual jokes in it. I feel like recently I've been reading a lot of books that felt like the writer did want to write something funny but also felt writing actual jokes would make it too easy, or something. Not this one though, there's jokes! With punchlines! That made me laugh!
It's also a rare book about movies that feels like a movie without being too self-conscious about its own desire to feel like a movie. I feel like Valente often runs into that, where she gets too into her own voice and overdoes it and it just ends up seeming kind of cheap. Dixit's writing style is pretty plain on a sentence level, but does a lot with its structure. It reminded me of Midnight's Children, but with less magical realism and more extremely well-observed realism. It's so easy to sink into and so hard to put down. I just really enjoyed it all the way through. The love story is dramatic, but not over-the-top about it. Prem slowly growing into himself is so so satisfying! Just watching him transform from someone so desperately afraid of other people to someone who realizes he loves and needs lots of people around him, and who goes out of his way to talk to strangers and make them feel comfortable on purpose, was really nice.
I grew up in the second Highest-Percentage-of-Indian-Americans town in New Jersey after Edison, which is half an hour away from me and which I visit at least a few times a year. Accordingly, about a third of my childhood besties and classmates were Indian American, so I'm familiar with some of the cultural stuff mentioned in this novel via lunch table osmosis. It did feel New Jersey to me for sure. Also I did academic decathlon the year the theme was India, so while the only Bollywood movies I've seen (PK and Three Idiots, the first only dubbed in Russian, as screened to me by my father who is a bit of a "thing, India" guy despite being Russian, and the second once in Russian and once with English subtitles at my friend's birthday party) were made after the time period covered in the novel, I recognized a lot of the Bollywood people cameos in a "Lata Mangeshkar from my Music Resource Guide packet mentioned!" kind of way. I don't think knowledge of Bollywood film is necessary to enjoy this book, but it would probably enhance it. My bestie did say "that's a super Bollywood way to start a story" when I was telling her about the first few chapters I'd just finished, but I mean. I think it really worked.
Anyway, I enjoyed reading this book and I hope you read it and enjoy it too!