7.4 /10 1 Votes
4/5 The Telegraph Publication date 26 September 2012 Originally published 26 September 2012 Publisher Penguin Books ISBN 0143123033 | 3.4/5 Goodreads Language English Pages 304 pages Genre Literary fiction Nominations Booker Prize | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Narcopolis, the debut novel of Indian author Jeet Thayil, is set in 1970s Old Bombay. It concerns opium and its influence. The novel's narrator arrives in Bombay, where he becomes seduced into the opium underground. The story expands to encompass such characters as Dimple, the eunuch, Rashid, the opium house's owner, and Mr Lee, a former Chinese officer, all of whom have stories to tell.
Contents
Autobiography element
The novel draws on his own experiences as a drug addict, and what he calls "the lost 20 years of my life". it took him five years to write the novel, and he called it "the opposite of catharsis. Catharsis gets stuff out of you. But this put bad feelings into me." Thayil decided to call the book Narcopolis "because Bombay seemed to me a city of intoxication, where the substances on offer were drugs and alcohol, of course, but also god, glamour, power, money and sex". Among the literary works to which Narcopolis has been compared are William S. Burroughs's Junkie and Thomas de Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium-Eater.
Reception
Narcopolis was shortlisted for the 2012 Man Booker Prize. The jury wrote that they "admired his perfumed prose from the drug dens and backstreets of India's most concentrated conurbation". Jeet Thayil won the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature 2013 at DSC Jaipur Literature Festival for Narcopolis.Narcopolis was shortlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize (2012) and The Hindu Literary Prize (2013).