A review by tshepiso
The Parcel by Anosh Irani

challenging dark emotional sad
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.5

The Parcel is a book I wouldn't have touched with a 100-metre pole if it hadn't been assigned reading for a uni course. It's the kind of literary fiction marketers describe as "raw" and "unflinching" that can best be summed up as graphic misery put to the page. I don't deny that the subject matter Anosh Irani tackles in this book, the sex traffic of children in Mumbai, isn't an important or worthy subject matter for a book but I am definitely not this book's target audience.

The Parcel follows a Hijra sex worker turned beggar Madhu as she is solicited by a brothel madam to "prepare" a Nepalese child for life as a sex worker. The book is ambling and expansive as we get the history of Madhu and her fellow sex workers' lives in Kathumapura, the red light district of Mumbai.

To describe this story as bleak is an understatement. The centre of this novel is the emotional tumult of our protagonist as she unpacks the ways her family and society as a whole discards her and people like her. Madhu is coarse and vulgar as she sifts through a lifetime of horrific trauma and Irani rarely pulls punches when he describes the gruesome realities of violence, rape, and abuse in the underbelly of Mumbai.

This book is visceral, occasionally vile and reads like an endless onslaught of misery. I don't doubt The Parcel is a well-crafted novel but it couldn't be farther from the kinds of books I enjoy reading and had a thoroughly unpleasant time with it.
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