mydiverse_bookshelf's review
dark
emotional
hopeful
reflective
tense
fast-paced
4.0
Content Warnings
Moderate: Misogyny, Miscarriage, Death, Infertility, and Emotional abuse
deepan2486's review
3.0
Rating: 2.5 / 5
Annie Zaidi knows the city. She knows the underbelly of sprawling metropolitans, the expanse of man-made disparities, and the cruel intermingling of the rich and the impoverished. In ‘City of Incident’, she brings forth this understanding of the urban life— into this fractured vignettes of life on the skyscrapers, on the streets, on the slums and on the mushroomed outskirts. Twelve chapters, twelve unique individuals caught in the urban web, and unable to flee the convoluted, distraught realities that cities of India pose today.
Zaidi’s new book can be called distinctly character driven, and can also be presented to be a well-documented, paradoxical treatise of humans living in this century. Her way of crafting this story is immensely persuasive, and deeply observant—often echoing the neglected sections of blooming poverty, scorching hunger, gnawing loneliness and intangible feelings of emptiness. There are no winners in this book. None of the characters end up with substantial amounts of solace or happiness, rather they all seem to be enlarging their hopelessness into more opaque senses of disillusionment, disparity and discrimination. As the book proceeds, some of the characters cross paths, and their own insecurities mingle and diffuse with one another—again giving us this vortex of urban entitlement that is hardly pretentious. Zaidi’s book gets staged anywhere and everywhere, in buses, trains, cars, railway bridges, apartment balconies, tainted rooms or highway streets. The stage players, Zaidi’s humans, do not have names, ranks, agencies or enforcements. All they have are unfortunate, haunting backdrops and equally disruptive back-stories that threaten to burst their bubble of even a moment’s contentment.
There remains to be a strange incompleteness in the story. If a reader wishes to believe that this is indeed ‘a novel in twelve parts’, they would want to believe that these are in fact short stories, and if they fixate on short stories, they will often see the book turning eerily novel-like. The chapters and the characters have vague interconnections, and the book ends rather steeply when you expect the stories to tie up. There exists a lack of coherence and organisation in the book’s story structure, readily meandering to spell out back-stories and reminisces of the characters without telling us what is happening ‘now’. The uniqueness of the characters takes a negative turn as we start to see that the book is not inclined in attempting to rise above this vignette style of writing. Some of the misfortunes take shape of unsolicited brooding, taking more time in explaining the bleakness of the city-dwellers’ lives than actually letting them live their life.
After a calm thought, the central disadvantage that I see in the book is: the author seems to have set a goal to present us a part of city life which is quite different from the affluent, snazzy, fast ways that a urban jungle gets associated with. Having set this goal, the writing generally fixates too much on describing the social, emotional and financial profiles of the characters— consequentially missing the objective that such profile backdrops can also be beautifully realised by the readers, through a story. In certain books, there doesn’t need to be an endless discourse on the characters’ bad destiny in order for the readers to come to terms with what they must be going through. A thorough profiling of the characters can be a good way to start a story and set its course, but it shouldn’t be the only pillar that the book stands upon. ‘City of Indicent’ seems to have largely missed the point of being consistently lifelike, because the characters are always conveniently seen in apparent shades of sadness—without keeping any space for them to breathe in happiness. While trying to bring in a totalitarian reality of urban existence, this book offers a very fractured, broken, unfinished perspective to poverty, abandonment and survival. As a result, the book feels more of an epilogue—unless you have sufficient imagination to fill the gaps, which here is the entire story to come.
What one can love about ‘City of Incident’ is the aftertaste that it brings to the reader’s mind, the bitter, chunky, uncomfortable chaos it hints at, and of course the shuddering realisation that the characters could be the last ten people you might have encountered. Zaidi keeps no distance between her readers and her fictional men and women, she plots them both in this game of urban survival, letting them fend for themselves— and then sitting afar in silence, absorbing the smoke and sounds around, letting observations materialise on paper.
Thanks Aleph for the e-copy.
Annie Zaidi knows the city. She knows the underbelly of sprawling metropolitans, the expanse of man-made disparities, and the cruel intermingling of the rich and the impoverished. In ‘City of Incident’, she brings forth this understanding of the urban life— into this fractured vignettes of life on the skyscrapers, on the streets, on the slums and on the mushroomed outskirts. Twelve chapters, twelve unique individuals caught in the urban web, and unable to flee the convoluted, distraught realities that cities of India pose today.
Zaidi’s new book can be called distinctly character driven, and can also be presented to be a well-documented, paradoxical treatise of humans living in this century. Her way of crafting this story is immensely persuasive, and deeply observant—often echoing the neglected sections of blooming poverty, scorching hunger, gnawing loneliness and intangible feelings of emptiness. There are no winners in this book. None of the characters end up with substantial amounts of solace or happiness, rather they all seem to be enlarging their hopelessness into more opaque senses of disillusionment, disparity and discrimination. As the book proceeds, some of the characters cross paths, and their own insecurities mingle and diffuse with one another—again giving us this vortex of urban entitlement that is hardly pretentious. Zaidi’s book gets staged anywhere and everywhere, in buses, trains, cars, railway bridges, apartment balconies, tainted rooms or highway streets. The stage players, Zaidi’s humans, do not have names, ranks, agencies or enforcements. All they have are unfortunate, haunting backdrops and equally disruptive back-stories that threaten to burst their bubble of even a moment’s contentment.
There remains to be a strange incompleteness in the story. If a reader wishes to believe that this is indeed ‘a novel in twelve parts’, they would want to believe that these are in fact short stories, and if they fixate on short stories, they will often see the book turning eerily novel-like. The chapters and the characters have vague interconnections, and the book ends rather steeply when you expect the stories to tie up. There exists a lack of coherence and organisation in the book’s story structure, readily meandering to spell out back-stories and reminisces of the characters without telling us what is happening ‘now’. The uniqueness of the characters takes a negative turn as we start to see that the book is not inclined in attempting to rise above this vignette style of writing. Some of the misfortunes take shape of unsolicited brooding, taking more time in explaining the bleakness of the city-dwellers’ lives than actually letting them live their life.
After a calm thought, the central disadvantage that I see in the book is: the author seems to have set a goal to present us a part of city life which is quite different from the affluent, snazzy, fast ways that a urban jungle gets associated with. Having set this goal, the writing generally fixates too much on describing the social, emotional and financial profiles of the characters— consequentially missing the objective that such profile backdrops can also be beautifully realised by the readers, through a story. In certain books, there doesn’t need to be an endless discourse on the characters’ bad destiny in order for the readers to come to terms with what they must be going through. A thorough profiling of the characters can be a good way to start a story and set its course, but it shouldn’t be the only pillar that the book stands upon. ‘City of Indicent’ seems to have largely missed the point of being consistently lifelike, because the characters are always conveniently seen in apparent shades of sadness—without keeping any space for them to breathe in happiness. While trying to bring in a totalitarian reality of urban existence, this book offers a very fractured, broken, unfinished perspective to poverty, abandonment and survival. As a result, the book feels more of an epilogue—unless you have sufficient imagination to fill the gaps, which here is the entire story to come.
What one can love about ‘City of Incident’ is the aftertaste that it brings to the reader’s mind, the bitter, chunky, uncomfortable chaos it hints at, and of course the shuddering realisation that the characters could be the last ten people you might have encountered. Zaidi keeps no distance between her readers and her fictional men and women, she plots them both in this game of urban survival, letting them fend for themselves— and then sitting afar in silence, absorbing the smoke and sounds around, letting observations materialise on paper.
Thanks Aleph for the e-copy.
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