Here’s a Clue: Mr. Kumar, With a Gun, in India
By JANET MASLIN writing in The New York Times, June 24, 2009
By JANET MASLIN writing in The New York Times, June 24, 2009
“Q&A,” the novel that became the basis for the smash-hit film “Slumdog Millionaire,” used questions from a television quiz show to prompt flashbacks about its main character’s life story. Here’s a question for its author, Vikas Swarup: Can a novel be any more high-concept than that?
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Photo of Vikas Swarup Aparna Swarup
SIX SUSPECTS
By Vikas Swarup
470 pages. Minotaur Books. US$24.99.
By Vikas Swarup
470 pages. Minotaur Books. US$24.99.
Yes it can. Mr. Swarup’s second novel, “Six Suspects,” is a Bollywood version of the board game Clue with a strain of screwball comedy thrown in.
Its stock characters are easily identified: the Bureaucrat, the Actress, the Tribal, the Thief, the Politician and the American. Each attended the party at which a man named Vicky Rai, a playboy film producer, was murdered. Each has a gun and a motive. And although the story’s geographical span is even bigger than India, the whole thing feels handily confined to the kind of isolated, air-tight setting that Agatha Christie’s readers love.
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Oddly enough, that ambition turns this formulaic-sounding book into a refreshing oddity. It bears no resemblance to any of the cookie-cutter genre books of this season. Its idiosyncrasy becomes apparent with the first of the six suspects, the Bureaucrat: Mohan Kumar, who was a man of power and influence until he hit forced retirement at 60. Thus adrift, he lets himself be coaxed to a séance at which the spirit of Gandhi is scheduled to appear. “I see dead people,” someone at the séance says with a snicker.
Janet Maslin's full review here.
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