Just read Siddhart Sanghvi’s The Last Song of Dusk.

Somehow, his good looks and elegant clothes made me very expectant about his book. So young and his eyes already so serene and writing books at this age about big big things!

Ah! But then, looks are very much deceptive. Now, after reading his book, he appears to me as the male counterpart of Jhumpa Lahiri. Much-hyped, less-delivered types.

His novel didn’t make sense to me. His characters were inconsistent. His wit forced, so was most of the plot. Bad play with surrealism and magic. A climax that was too quickly delivered, not like a good and strong final blow, but more like things were made to end as if for a lack of time or pages...  

There were some hints of genius, a couple of lines, an expression, but not enough to last the entire book.

Nothing prosy about his style. And more annoying was his use of uppercasing for words like Hope, Fate, Quietness!

Arundhati Roy and Salman Rushdie influenced?

Maybe his only other book (he has given up writing for good) The Lost Flamingoes of Bombay will be a better read.

All in all, I have at least realized my 18 year old self was as lost in crushing on Sanghvi, as he was in trying to write a book on half baked ancestral stories.

And if I already didn’t know he was gay, after reading the book, I would have been certain.

There is this way with which he describes the male body… Something only a lover could do so well.

Talking about gay writers, I dreamed of Vikram Seth last night! If my dreams get any more crazy, I am going to have to write a book about them!

Anyway, next up on my reading list is The Moor’s Last Sigh. Now there is an original psychedelic read.