Red, you say that and then this:

The twist at the end was pointless too.

Meaning that you actually got to the end and found out who the narrator was. So WTF? Have I missed something?

Despite that, I luuurrved the book, especially the slang though I generally cannot abide reading books in dialect. (Their Eyes Were Watching God – like, two pages and i had to stop). The economics lecture in the middle didn’t make a lot of sense but all you haters, man, don’t have to take it so seriously. it’s hard for any book to live up to its hype.

xoxo, mallu newbie from toronto

so the slang, yes. the story in general and the whizzbanger of an ending? not so much.

It’s one of the themes in the novel. How to escape a lifetime of drudgery working at Heathrow airport.

It’s easy to mock Ajit’s sentiment that they hadn’t done their homework…but there’s a more serious point, that these ‘rudeboys’ are just harming themselves with their attitude. By not caring about school, and not looking to the future, they are condemning themselves to a lifetime of economic struggle (and marginal economic status). They’re the ones who’ll suffer in the end. But yes it’s possibly also true that there might not be a whole lot of opportunities in the UK anyway (any comments on that, Red Snapper?).

Authors should of course be free to write as they please. But the style should evolve directly from the content, and literary devices/techniques should be necessary to tell the story effectively. They should not be pyrotechnics used to disguise, like special effects in a bad movie.

‘Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.’ -Einstein

Now,there’s a recipe that seems to have worked.

apkapita: Maybe, one day I will have the ability to write a post without using timepass.

On the whole use of slang versus non slang: I think it is up to each author to write in whatever style they want. If the consumer chooses to buy the product than so be it. Vikram Chandra said he wrote Sacred Games for himself and his family who experienced some of the things that inspired the book. I rather like his peppering of prose with some Mumbai slang every now and again.

With Londonstani, I thought it would be interesting had the slang been introduced selectively rather than the whole book. I thought Jas as narrator could have at least been written without the use of the “desi patois.”