Customer Reviews

Bombay Talkie

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

This is a breezy popular novel and great read with many insights into navigating the conflicts of Indian-American identity. An Indian-American returns to India and learns more about her country and herself. The story moves fast and entertainingly, and its affecting sensational content dramatises our understanding of the character's conflicts with superb insight. Such cross-cultural differences as sexual identity and male-female relationships are delineated with acuity and power. A scene of widow-burning, for example, brings home the senseless cruelty of this Indian practise with searing effect. The novel's depiction of upper-class dilemmas -- the worlds it reveals are those of the affluent well-born -- are particularly well-drawn, with appealing and entertaining wit. A must-read.

Ameena Meer shows the hypocrisy of the westernised high class as, although the male characters seem to live a modern life, they still claim traditional values that oppress women.

I think this novel sheds light on the growing majority of diasporic indians all over the world. It deals with the silent struggles of these youths who are attempting to balance western with eastern. I thought that it was a quick read and I think Meer did a really good job of story telling. The episodes flowed right into one another which made the novel seem almost cinematic. I think this is one author that has been overlooked in the recent fad of indian fiction.

I read Bombay Talkie nearly ten years ago when I was just out of college and going to visit India for the first time.. though I am of Indian origin. I found this novel to be dead-on in its portrayal of the young expats living and partying in Delhi. Its also very funny, and as others have reviewed, a very quick and effortless read. Just the thing for a holiday or a plane trip. The ending is surprisingly touching, when the young lead, so eager to get away from her childhood, finally embraces it.

Ameena Meer's first novel, "Bombay Talkie", is about the world of the upper-class Indian "Brat pack". Sabah is a young American-born rich kid, who as many young leads in immigration based novels, is searching for identity. Her search, however, is through partying , men and her travels to India and back. The plot is a bit difficult to follow but it seems to center on Sabah's relationship with her best friend Rani, who goes to India to marry, and her cousin Adam, who she meets up with in New York after he follows his male lover there from London. In her attempt to flood the reader with shocking subject matter, Meer loses focus. Amir brings up some interesting aspects of the new generation and she has an eye for detail, but the characters could use more complexity.

I was thoroughly disappointed with this book. At the start I had hoped it would develop into an interesting read... probably based on someone's personal experience, as I found certain references true to my own... However, even before I was a fifth of the way through, I realised that I was wrong and that the novel had already lost its plot.

Its as though Ameena Meer has used her limited experience of Indian High Society as the weak foundations for this unbalanced story. Attempts to relate and link characters may have worked if she had tried.. as you expect the pieces to fall together so much better in the end. It neither accomplished this, nor does she manage to decide what the purpose of the main character's visit to India was. There are too many unanswered questions.. as though Meer wasn't quite sure from the start where she was going, but she decided to have a go anyway... probably why she occasionally throws in some shocking storylines.. in the hope that her audience will forget how terrible the book is.

The author's favourite means of ovecoming her writer's block was to introduce another gay character or to kill people off when she was unsure of their fate.

The worst thing about this novel is that it could have been so much better.. maybe she should have another go... but put her heart in it this time, and actually do some research for a change

Though this is the umpteenth novel about the problems of identity for Indians and Pakistanis who have grown up in the UK or the USA, it is still, nevertheless, entertaining and parts of it were easy to identify with (being a British Pakistani myself). The central plot was quite an interesting, though hardly novel, idea about the expatriate returning to the Homeland (in this case India) to find herself but I feel such an important topic needed to have been dealt with in a more thorough manner and the characters could have been developed further and in much more detail. Ameena writes well and this could have been a great book but it was too superficial a treatment of an important subject.

However many hours I spent reading this novel were wasted ones. I moved on to Nirmal Verma's Under Cover of Darkness immediately after Bombay Talkie and I was relieved that, yes, some writers do have talent. A self professed lover of literature should not be submitting garbage like Bombay Talkie for publication.

Like Amy Tann, Meer does well in pandering to an Anglo-American audience. While Tann portrays all Chinese men as drunken, wife abusers, Meer portrays them all as queers and homosexuals. Perhaps in her next novel, she can up the ante: an all out war between India and Pakistan in which all the young men are killed. The two female heroines view the horror from a moonlit terrace balcony for a few minutes before complaining about the horrible stench of rotting bodies, then returning to the extravagent party in which many exotic dishes are served. The next day, they go shopping for cute outfits before returning to America and marrying sexy blue-eyes musicians who walk with swaggers and whose muscles pulsate. They would now no longer have to differentiate between those they marry and those they love. On a positive note, the book contains vivid imagery and has some bits of humour. However, the overall shallowness of the girls( who barely acknowledge the poverty as they party through India [ maybe this is Meer's point!]), the negative male connotations, the complete lack of plot, and the unfathomable 'celebritiness' of the story cannot save it.

I've read several books by Indian authors and I am also of Indian descent, and I can say unequivocally that this is the worst book with an Indian theme that I have ever read. First it is incoherently paced with a lot of unnecessary coincidence and forced dialogue. The characters are not well defined, and new characters are either introduced or killed based on what is convenient for the plot. I also believe it is an inaccurate depiction of Indian life as well as growing up with Indian parents in the US. There is no sort of resolution in the book - no sense of what the characters have learned, how they've grown, what has changed them. All we know is that the central character is happy to be back in the US but annoyed that her ex-boyfriend has moved on.

If you want to read a truly good book that has Indian life and community as its backdrop, try Jhumpa Lahiri, or Chitra Divakaruni, or Manil Suri, or Rohinton Mistry, or the countless other Indian actors who deserve to be published far more than Ameena Meer