![]() 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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