![]() The Paradise of House is narrated from the point of view of Hafeezuddin Babar, aka Guddu Miyan, an orphan who grows up in a large joint family. No sense that the author was sharing something he cared about with me, his reader. But in the end there was no joy in this read. I could quote whole sentences and paragraphs and chapters that left me weak-kneed with their intensity and beauty. I can honestly say I fell in love with each exquisite sentence after another of this feast. Reading this novel is like being force-fed a feast of words all the while knowing you'll be sick in the end. There is no nourishment in this book that comes without the cost of corresponding filth. But always along with these vivid food-sense impressions comes a coupling of descriptions of grotesque foul digestion and excrement and decay. ![]() Its sentences are a nearly synesthetic paean to food and its preparation. An obsession with food's smells and colors and sounds and taste all like fireworks in their vividness and their cadence. ![]() ![]() There are glorious wild descriptions of food on nearly every page. The subtitle of this novel could be Confessions of a Bulimic Intellectual. ![]()
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