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Tokyo Cancelled (Paperback)

by Rana Dasgupta (Author) "THERE WAS CHAOS ..." (more)
3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (45 customer reviews)
RRP: £7.99
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Product details

  • Paperback: 416 pages
  • Publisher: HarperPerennial; Reprint edition (6 Feb 2006)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 0007182139
  • ISBN-13: 978-0007182138
  • Product Dimensions: 19.6 x 12.4 x 3.2 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (45 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 161,293 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Product Description

Review

'Only the most gifted writers, like Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Jonathan Safran-Foer, can hold the surreal and the real in satisfying equilibrium. This elite now welcomes Rana Dasgupta to its ranks. He makes magic realism his own, and his debut novel is superb. The novel's momentum comes from the narrators, though the plot in which they come together is deceptively mundane: their plane is grounded and they tell stories to pass the night. But this is just the structural glue for a series of spellbinding tales composed in a crisp but poetic prose which already has the hallmarks of a signature style. Dasgupta's gift for inventing stories is quite remarkable: you feel he could go on forever and never get boring. TOKYO CANCELLED is profound, but in the humblest and most sensitive way. A treat.' Andrew Staffell, Time Out 'Book of the Week' 'Executed with elegance and charm' The Guardian 'This is a very bold, very striking book. In an age when so many first fictions are thinly veiled autobiography, and every other creative writing tutor is peddling the 'Write what you know' mantra, it is exceptionally refreshing to read a writer who is daring to imagine, rather than transcribe. TOKYO CANCELLED is an unforgettable book, with its own peculiar charms. I shall be fascinated to see what happens next.' Staurt Kelly, The Scotsman


TLS

‘Thirteen stories ... marvels of fabulation, visions and voices, rich in startling insights.’ --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
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THERE WAS CHAOS. Read the first page
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Customer Reviews

45 Reviews
5 star:
 (9)
4 star:
 (10)
3 star:
 (15)
2 star:
 (9)
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 (2)
 
 
 
 
 
Average Customer Review
3.3 out of 5 stars (45 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars Unlucky thirteen, 12 April 2009
By tallpete33 (London, UK) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)      
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Programme (What's this?)
Tokyo Cancelled is a collection of short stories told by air travellers stranded overnight at an un-named airport en route to the Japanese capital. We are told nothing about the travellers telling the tales.

I would be lying if I said I enjoyed this book. The author certainly has a vivid imagination and a gentle and often charming way with his prose but a lot of the stories left a bad taste and were just plain weird or "wrong" even. There is the deformed dwarf who sleeps with his beautiful sister, the dressmaker who changes tack to partake in hardcore S&M, the businessman who escapes from his wife to a flat with a sex doll of his own creation and more. These stories are not erotic, sometimes just plain depressing and often inaccessible. I say this as a broad minded and experienced reader. The author is no stranger to an unhappy ending and I was left with the impression he was an only child who spent a lot of his early years being unkind to small animals.

This is not to say there are not good points. I enjoyed the story of Robert de Niro's lovechild who on finding the Willy Wonka style golden ticket in a box of Oreo's, won ten cookies that could turn his girlfriend into an upmarket department store for the day. This was imaginative and amusing, rare humour amongst a lot of darkness. This was a gem as were the two shortest stories, The Speed Bump and The Flyover. I also enjoyed The Changeling, the non-human being who was "outed" during a Parisian small pox epidemic. However, The Dream Recycler and Memory Maker were quite clever (maybe too clever) but similar and mostly confusing. Fans of Iain M Banks may get more out of those than me.

I would have liked to know more about the storytellers and how they came across their tales but as mentioned, we are clueless as to who said what. There is scant dialogue between the stories so the whole "Tokyo Cancelled" thing was a bit of a red herring and disappointing for me as it could have added to the book overall. A modern Canterbury Tales it ain't.

I like the occasional flutter but I would be unlikely to gamble on another Dasgupta book.

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8 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars 'Fairy'tales for the twenty first century, 1 April 2005
This review is from: Tokyo Cancelled (Hardcover)
Tokyo Cancelled is an amazing, haunting book.

For one, it would be inaccurate to call it a novel. Tokyo Cancelled most definitely is not a novel - it is cycle of stories, in the tradition of the Canterbury Tales, except that the stories aren't set in medieval England, but most definitely in the mega-cities of the twenty first century. Delhi, Lagos, Tokyo Buenos Aires, New York... It is a compelling narrative strategy, and had me hooked. (Also the breaks between stories are definitive, which allows you to get some work done while reading, as there is some, albeit uneasy, sense of closure. a definite advantage over the page turning thriller..)

And the stories themselves - they are fabulously rich in detail and verve and colour, and fantastical in their imagination, and description of the world. But the stories remind you not so much of the magic realism of Rushdie, but of the foreboding 'fairytales' of the Brothers Grimm. There is a definite evocation of the language and tropes and characters of fairytales, foundlings and changelings and princesses locked in towers, legends and folklore, so abandoned in the contemporary world . (My favourite story, that of Robert de Niro's illegitimate son driving a Taxi in New York, has at its core a South Indian foktale about a girl could who could transform into a tree.) But these are not just fairytales, or rather are fairytales in the truest, undiluted sense of the term - for they haunt you with their strangeness long after you have finished reading them, making you think about the city/cities you have lived in - and realising that like sanitised fairytales, our cities are actually dark, magical and fantastical in their everydayness, and that they have connections to the larger world which we can't quite fathom...

fairytales for the twenty first century, which make you think about the 'real' cities you inhabit. A rare feat, and a refeshingly new and different way of thinking, and writing the world.

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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars Overblown, 28 Jun 2009
By S. Pawley - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Programme (What's this?)
Rana Dasgupta's first book is a collection of stories, very loosely held together by the conceit that they are being told by a group of passengers stranded for the night in a Tokyo airport. Dasgupta says the concept was inspired by The Cantebury Tales (the comparison is somewhat stretched) and this gives an idea of the level of his ambition.
Unfortunately, he is often over-ambitious, to the point of over-stretching himself. A warning sign comes on p. 1 when the word 'eschatalogical' is used in a context that indicates the author does not know what it means. Capital letters are inserted, apparently at random, (eg: "People were Taking Stock." p. 4) with no obvious function other than to convey to the reader that Dasgupta wishes to push the boundaries of form -- but to what end?
Things do pick up, and some of the stories are reasonably good yarns. But on the whole I felt that the stories themselves, like the writing style, were frequently overblown. They are self-contained sketches that try to convey a profound idea in the space of 20 or 30 pages. That's not easy, and Dasgupta simply is not up to the task. That is not to say that his writing is bad, and he may produce good fiction in the future, but with this first effort I feel he has overshot.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews

3.0 out of 5 stars Imaginative twist on a fine old idea
Tokyo Cancelled is based on an intriguing premise - thirteen people are stranded at an airport somewhere (in Asia, I presume) waiting for a connecting flight to snowbound Tokyo,... Read more
Published 1 month ago by A. J. Cull

1.0 out of 5 stars If only it had been
Let me warn you now that I'm going to pay back the infliction of long-hauling through Tokyo Cancelled and relieve myself by invecting all over this sorry waste of finite time,... Read more
Published 2 months ago by the antiquary

4.0 out of 5 stars Rana Dasgupta is now on my 'Read this' list
The basic format of this book is a collection of short stories a collection of stranded passengers tell each other to pass the night. Read more
Published 2 months ago by Clive Carter

3.0 out of 5 stars A magic realism short story collection
Tokyo Cancelled is not a novel. It is not even a 'frame' story (stories within a main story, like One Thousand & One Nights, The Decameron or Canterbury Tales, or on a more... Read more
Published 3 months ago by Doctor Goa -

5.0 out of 5 stars Beautiful
There's no point my wasting your time telling you what I think of it. Just read it. This is a lovely book: intelligent, amusing, thought provoking. I am not worthy. Buy it now.
Published 3 months ago by SARAH MCCARTNEY

4.0 out of 5 stars Not Canterbury Tales, but not bad either
It's obvious from the outset that this book aims to be a modern Canterbury Tales. In that respect it fails. Read more
Published 3 months ago by Paul B

2.0 out of 5 stars Ok
I loved the idea for this one - a delayed flight leading to a group of passengers stranded in the terminal overnight telling each other stories. Read more
Published 4 months ago by M. D. Hart

2.0 out of 5 stars Not for me.
Thisbook did not engage me at all. I found none of the characters interesting, or any of the stories worth delving into. Read more
Published 4 months ago by Rosslock

3.0 out of 5 stars A good premise, but too whimsical for some tastes
The premise of this book is an excellent one: passengers stranded in an airport begin to talk to each other and swap stories. Read more
Published 4 months ago by littlepig littlepig

4.0 out of 5 stars Diverse and and Thought Provoking
This selection of 13 short stories have the feel of modern, but sometimes grotesque fairytales that lingers in you mind long after you read the book. Read more
Published 4 months ago by Bumbobe

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