- Hardcover: 400 pages
- Publisher: Flamingo (21 May 2001)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0002570890
- ISBN-13: 978-0002570893
- Product Dimensions: 23.6 x 16 x 4.3 cm
- Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 1,844,575 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Description
Amazon.co.uk Review
Ruchir Joshi's debut The Last Jet-Engine Laugh is buoyed by the belief that everything matters, that every ephemeral peak, deepening drop, every drive, every breakfast, every touch, sound and word slowly forming, extends to the heart of some fundamental genetic momentum.
Paresh is the glue of the story, son of two former non-violent revolutionaries who met on a demonstration in Ahmedabad. Detached from the urgency that fuelled his parents' convictions, he adopts a passive stance toward the events of his life, becomes an observer. His daughter, Para, in turn exposed to Paresh's haphazard experience, his lack of urgency, takes firm root in combat flying. Reaction and adaptation, circumstance and principle: through the characters' instalment in the present--1970-2000-2030--and through the evolution of one family, the future of India and Indians is skilfully conjured. In a matter of decades, India has become a militaristic power from its ascetic, caste-structured past and Para, only one generation removed from Thoreauvian pacifists, has become a war hero. The wonder of Joshi's narrative is not the fantastic leaps he takes but that he makes them so convincingly.
Ruchir Joshi is relaxed and sincere, often ironic and very funny. Those readers wary of the vigorous Indian literary invasion, those tired of Salman Rushdie's apocalyptic seriousness or still angry at Tagore for The Home and the World, will find here a strong clear voice. --Michael Kedda
Review
‘Joshi has the master’s eye for his surroundings… This is surely a great moment for the national literature of India.’ Daily Telegraph
‘Here is proof positive that it's possible for Indian writers to be wickedly cynical, funny and bitter without the scathing edge blunting the Indianness or vice versa… Put simply, The Last Jet-Engine Laugh is a family saga across three generations. But before you yawn and reach for the remote saying, "Yaar, saala, it's been done before," it ain't quite been done like this. Joshi is a most unsuitable boy, and if there were a glass palace about, he'd be the one throwing stones.' Anita Roy, Biblio Review of Books
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
I'm still getting my breath back! This is something utterly new in Indian fiction, and given that India unquestionably has one of the world's strongest literary traditions, that's saying something.
Joshi shows us exactly what the novel can do in this break-neck, flash-cutting ride through the lives of three generations of an Indian family from 1970 to 2030. Paresh, the central character, is a photographer of some renown, a sad and disillusioned man who is found at the opening of the novel living in a future India which is only too chillingly believable. (Bombay and Karachi have both been taken out by terrorist nuclear strikes; there are riots over water; teams of female crack fighter pilots are involved in border skirmishes with an American-funded Pakistan.) His own life, along with the narratives of his parents and of his daughter Para (who is herself a fighter pilot), are given to us almost as a succession of photographic stills - at first this makes it a little difficult to keep track of what is going on, but ultimately the effect is exhilarating in the extreme. However, this is postmodernism with a heart - the relationship between Paresh and Para is particularly moving, and there are some extraordinarily intense scenes of emotional desolation (Paresh has lost his lover Sandhi in the Bombay nuclear strike, and despairs for the safe return of his daughter from her latest mission).
This is not an easy read, but unquestionably a moving and exhilarating one. As a demonstration of what astonishing speeds and high-G-force turns the contemporary novel is capable of, this book is unrivalled.
Format:Paperback
I bought this book at a second hand stall under Waterloo Bridge in London on a rainy day when I was having a quarrel with a visiting friend, she who once told me 'for every thing you lose there is something you gain'. So we lost hours of friendship through the quarrel, but it steered me towards that stall and that book, and now we are still friends and I have one of my eight desert island books, which is the more treasured for being read so many times and carrying the evidence of each occasion. Joshi has a way with language both English and Indian that transcends the printed word and gets right inside your head. He is brilliant at his characterisations - his people are alive. His plot is unpredictable and gripping. His coverage of issues, like water becoming a war-worthy commodity, is prescient. His humour is laugh-aloud. His love of photography shines through, like when he describes a bar-man waltzing a crate of beer from his fridge. And the story is touching: one man's life, so many loves made and lost, and the one enduring love for his daughter. Go on, treat yourself!
Format:Hardcover
No doubt, Joshi's novel is unlike anything I've ever come across in Indian fiction before. It's fast, bitty, covering continents, characters and time with total abandon. It's as if Joshi has idea after idea and has to pursue and develop each one as he thinks of it.
Ostensibly a family tale centred on Paresh Bhatt, a photographer, the novel moves from recalling his parents' lives on the cusp of Indian independence to that of his daughter, a top class fighter pilot, based on a space station in 2030. Along the way, there are copious little asides about the lives of his friends; his life in Paris; his father's friend's experience in a Siberian gulag; ponderings on the fate of an Indian indepence champion killed in the war; his first sexual experiences; various women in his life; his love of coffee; the rarity of real water etc.
There is no question but that this is a daring book: daringly original and innovative in style. There is also no question that I also found it almost unreadable. It hopped about from one character to another, from a first person narrative to a third person narrative, from one time or continent to another with such haste that I never really engaged in the story. What was to keep me reading if two paragraphs later Joshi was going to introduce yet another new scenario/time/location/character, as if he were starting new stories time and time again within sequential paragraphs? Equally because the action flit between the past (actual history), the future and a computer-simulated retelling of the past, Joshi constantly fluctuated between a scantly descriptive style for the past (where a knowledge level is assumed) and a highly over descriptive style for the future (where every detail has to be explained because it's new to us). The overall effect is disorienting to say the least and not especially rewarding; the book simply unravels. For the first time in ages, I was simply glad to be shot of this book when I'd finished it. A real disappointment.
Ostensibly a family tale centred on Paresh Bhatt, a photographer, the novel moves from recalling his parents' lives on the cusp of Indian independence to that of his daughter, a top class fighter pilot, based on a space station in 2030. Along the way, there are copious little asides about the lives of his friends; his life in Paris; his father's friend's experience in a Siberian gulag; ponderings on the fate of an Indian indepence champion killed in the war; his first sexual experiences; various women in his life; his love of coffee; the rarity of real water etc.
There is no question but that this is a daring book: daringly original and innovative in style. There is also no question that I also found it almost unreadable. It hopped about from one character to another, from a first person narrative to a third person narrative, from one time or continent to another with such haste that I never really engaged in the story. What was to keep me reading if two paragraphs later Joshi was going to introduce yet another new scenario/time/location/character, as if he were starting new stories time and time again within sequential paragraphs? Equally because the action flit between the past (actual history), the future and a computer-simulated retelling of the past, Joshi constantly fluctuated between a scantly descriptive style for the past (where a knowledge level is assumed) and a highly over descriptive style for the future (where every detail has to be explained because it's new to us). The overall effect is disorienting to say the least and not especially rewarding; the book simply unravels. For the first time in ages, I was simply glad to be shot of this book when I'd finished it. A real disappointment.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
A subtle alternate history
We don't get to see. anything like enough science fiction from outside the Anglo-American alliance. The Last Jet-Engine Laught shows us what can be done with the genre from a quite... Read more
Published on 4 Jan 2002 by Farah
Glory hallelujah!
Heard about Ruchir Joshi's novel along with Pankaj Mishra and Raj Kamal Jha and almost didn't read it because those two were so awful and so pretentious. Read more
Published on 28 May 2001
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