Narcopolis (book)

Narcopolis
Cover of Narcopolis by Jeet Thayil
Author Jeet Thayil
Language English
Publisher Penguin Books
Publication date
26 September 2012
Pages 304 pages
ISBN 0143123033

Narcopolis, the debut novel of Indian author Jeet Thayil, is set in 1970s Old Bombay. It concerns opium and its influence. The novel's narrator arrives in Bombay, where he becomes seduced into the opium underground. The story expands to encompass such characters as Dimple, the eunuch, Rashid, the opium house's owner, and Mr Lee, a former Chinese officer, all of whom have stories to tell.

Autobiography element

The novel draws on his own experiences as a drug addict, and what he calls "the lost 20 years of my life".[1] it took him five years to write the novel, and he called it "the opposite of catharsis. Catharsis gets stuff out of you. But this put bad feelings into me."[2] Thayil decided to call the book Narcopolis "because Bombay seemed to me a city of intoxication, where the substances on offer were drugs and alcohol, of course, but also god, glamour, power, money and sex".[3] Among the literary works to which Narcopolis has been compared are William S. Burroughs's Junkie and Thomas de Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium-Eater.[4]

Reception

Narcopolis was shortlisted for the 2012 Man Booker Prize. The jury wrote that they "admired his perfumed prose from the drug dens and backstreets of India's most concentrated conurbation".[5] Jeet Thayil won the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature 2013 at DSC Jaipur Literature Festival for Narcopolis.[6]Narcopolis was shortlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize (2012) and The Hindu Literary Prize (2013).[7][8]

References

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