Customer Reviews

An Outline of the Republic: A Novel

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I actually struggled to finish Outline, and for a novel with such great potential, I was disappointed.

The premise seemed good. A journalist finds a mysterious picture of a porn star about to be executed by a paramilitary group and wagers his career to figure out the story behind it. As he travels through remote territory in northeast India, a picturesque region beset by spasms of violence, he discovers a web of corruption and lies. This story held my interest, and my desire to learn about the political situation in that region (albeit in a fictionalized way) were what kept me reading.

But I think Deb made a few mistakes. The first is his prose style. When he writes a vivid scene, he does well with it. However, most of the book is summary. Summary of conversations, scenery, bus rides, historical background. And it gets dull. Perhaps Deb's strength as a journalist is his weakness as a novelist. It's not that these sections are bad, it's simply that they could so easily be made better. The tone of his prose also seems very detached and reporterly, which quite frankly is unengaging. He also lacks a novelist's knack for memorable characterization, and as a result his characters blend together. Another problem is the protagonist, Amrit Singh, who is passive, detached, disillusioned, and depressed. He's just not that interesting of a guy, and the reason he's not interesting is because he doesn't care about anything very much. If the protagonist doesn't really care, why should the reader?

None of these are fatal flaws and could be forgiven if the plot were carried out as it should have been. But alas, Deb fails to make good on his plot's potential. I think the plot fails because Deb makes things too easy for Amrit. In this book, Amrit doesn't do anything to make readers root for him; our allegiance is assumed (and unearned). And even worse, for a journalist, Amrit doesn't seem that keen on or good at seeking out information on his own. In fact, most of the book consists of characters appearing out of nowhere to take Amrit into their confidence and voluntarily tell him lots and lots of the information he needs to know next. He doesn't have to work for it. He just sits by the phone and waits for people to call after they've arranged his travel plans, or wanders down into a strange neighborhood where he passes out and wakes up to see the person he's looking for. Nobody is actively trying to trick him or throw him off the trail; in fact, potential foils give him rides on his journey. It's both implausible and insipid. The novel would have been more entertaining if Amrit had to work for the pieces of the puzzle and had to put them together himself, instead of stumbling into people with an ever-increasing knowledge of the story he's investigating.

I do think Deb has an interesting perspective, and as far as content is concerned, his book is worthwhile as an expose of bureaucratic corruption in India, a discussion of the legacy of colonialism, and a critique of the way nations deal with the "edges" of their populations.

I would recommend this book if you're interested in the content of the book, particularly if you're looking for depictions of journalism in fiction, how authors in postimperial countries are rewriting The Heart of Darkness, or if you want to read a novel that explores the political situation in northeast India or the corruption of NGOs. Otherwise, it's a mediocre read.

Deb captures the contingent nature of life in the Indian republic by taking us to it's very edge, the Northeast, where many lies come together to form the truth, or many truths coalesce into one big lie, depending on which way you look at it. The central quest in the novel is fragmented and uncertain, riddled with falsehoods, and is undertaken by an imperfect hero who needs to go further in so that he can get the hell out. In the end it the book is not just about a faraway place where no one needs to go, it's also about the flawed nature of democracy wherever you might live.

This book is important, worth reading, and totally different from most contemporary South Asian fiction.

Surface is a very well written but ultimately disappointing novel set in Northeast India that has had a history of insurgent violence that is both political but often borders on politics as justification for what amounts to organized criminal activity. The story centers on Amrit, a disaffected reporter for the Sentinel in Calcutta. After discovering and becoming captivated a photograph of a young woman who was possibly executed by an insurgent group for being in porn films, and having made contact with a supposed representative of a German magazine interested in a story on North East India, Amrit takes off to the region to uncover the story.

While the prose is wonderful the novel itself is a disappointment. The story meanders from one scene to the next as Amrit uncovers the mystery of the young woman and the conclusion is unsatisfying as the reader wonders why either Amrit or the reader made this journey to begin with.

Note: This novel is also published under the title Surface.

Amrit, a journalist from Calcutta, now in his thirties and disillusioned with his life which leaves him little room to grow, takes off on an assignment for a German magazine to uncover the story of a porn star, supposedly executed by militants. He has found her photo in his newspaper's morgue and she at once takes hold of his imagination. To find if she could still be living, he travels deep into the lawless hill states between China and Burma. Slowly he enters a world where nothing is at it seems: deserted buildings, rusty signs, buses that hardly creep along roads which are hardly passable. In shabby hotels strangers knock on his door, or accost him at his table, each insistent on spilling forth their stories over quantities of whisky. Every encounter is illusive, half conclusive, the falsehoods so deftly mixed with truth that even the speaker cannot break them apart.

Pushing deeper into the hostile and harsh land, Amrit encounters officials with suitcases spilling open money, large hotels entirely stripped of furnishings but for a few rooms, hearing always of a great and altruistic man who has started something called a Prosperity Project which will help everyone in need. Amrit still steadfastly seeks the missing girl in the picture and as he travels on crowded buses, or jeeps, hearing contradictory stories of her, he begins to feel in some way that her journey is his own.

The India portrayed in An Outline of the Republic is different than any other I have encountered: neither Bollywood nor the shanties of Calcutta, the memories of the glittering princes of the Raj; no temples, comfortable middle classes, arranged marriages, or religious fervor on the shores of the Ganges, but a world utterly apart, forgotten. It is a corner of India where people's souls have been so thoroughly scraped out that they no longer consider them, but exist somehow in this violent world, struggling hand-to-mouth for existence. Deb writes of one town: "It was a town dissolving bit by bit into a state of nothingness, crumbling into an ocean of absence, with each one of us in the town seceding in his or her own way from the blinding presence of the republic."

"It is the only way to live in the region," someone says. "To conceal surfaces under other surfaces is necessary." But as the story continues, the benefactor of the Prosperity Project is not as he first seemed to Amrit, nor is the girl in the picture, and indeed, once Amrit has gone as deep as he can go and still remain safe, he is also no longer what he thought he was.

A compelling novel from a sensitive writer with a remarkable journalist's eye to capture this obscure, unsettling corner of India.

I had throughly enjoyed Siddhartha Deb's first book: Point of No Return, but since it was during the period that I was reading a whole cluster of Indian authors I wasn't sure what my response to his second book would be. Having just finished his latest book, I can say, unequivocally, that this is a wonderful writer! with a very distinguished and impressive style. I really felt that I was with the narrator Amrit as he travels the Northeastern border of India in his quest to uncover the story of the woman in the photograph. I had the pleasure of hearing Deb read from his first book awhile back and recently heard him on NPR discussing his research and goals with this latest book and can heartily recommend it and feel quite confident that you will not only enjoy it but agree with me that we are reading someone who will become an importnat writer of our times.