‘Tokyo Cancelled’

I finally read Rana Dasgupta’s ‘05 debut Tokyo Cancelled and liked it so much I bought it twice — once in Calcutta and once again, against my will, in Bombay. I hope the folks who clean airplane seatbacks are into literary fiction. Dasgupta grew up in the UK and moved to Delhi a few years ago.

Tokyo Cancelled is a short story collection with a small bit of facia connecting each story, an attempt to sell the book as a novel. The attempt is transparent in a way the stories are not, skipping across continents and the laws of physics. I’d never before read a short story set in Lagos or one about Istanbul by a desi author.

My main complaint is that Dasgupta churns out plot like Gabriel García Márquez, with scant interest in the details. The author is clearly someone with a fantastical imagination and, I’d imagine, a childhood penchant for spinning elaborate tales. But the thrust is on odd twists of plot rather than texture or substance. Dasgupta isn’t as frustrating as Haruki Murakami, whose stories’ aimlessness put me off to upside-down elephants in any realm other than the political. But he’s content to offhandedly introduce and dispose of themes and side characters which merited stories all to themselves.

Another annoyance in these tales is that they feel derivative, more remixes than totally novel plot points. Much of Dasgupta’s surrealism has been done before by authors working both in magical realism and sci-fi; the Pygmalion android tale is a particular offender, and the misshapen protagonist of ‘The Billionaire’s Sleep’ reminds me of the antihero Moor in Rushdie’s The Moor’s Last Sigh. In the same story, the wealthy Rajiv Malhotra has the sleeping sickness from One Hundred Years of Solitude. There’s a story about a man whose job it is to cull people’s memories, eliminate the trauma and sell them back on disk — see Robin Williams in Final Cut (2004).

Many of the stories simply remix fairytales like ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes,’ ‘Sleeping Beauty,’ ‘Rapunzel’ and ‘Jack and the Beanstalk.’ Dasgupta seems to delight in setting up powerful women for a gruesome fall, and he dates his stories with references to brands like Starbucks and CNN.

But even Dasgupta’s weakest story is more raw fun than that other quiet, colorless, celebrated collection by a desi author. He’s working on his next (actually, first) novel:

He’s guarded about its theme but has gone on record to say that he has been working on it for about nine months and that it will be about a fictional prophet and his sayings. [Link]

Here are Jabberwock, the Guardian, the Telegraph and Outlook India on the book.