I found this book to be beautifully written, sad and incredibly readable. It is one that I would whole heartedly recommend. The Lost Flamingoes of Bombay tracks how one tragic event can change the course of many people's lives. In it, a famous actress is shot and killed and we see how her friends react to such an event.

I whole heartedly recommend this book.

Do I like the cover?: Not really.  It feels like a throwaway.  As Karan's photography is the focus of the novel, I would have loved a black and white photo of Bombay instead.

First line: 'Oh, God, Iqbal,' Karan Seth said, looking warily at his boss, 'you sound like you're setting me up for trouble.'

Review: This novel is a bit like a tabloid-tell-all, set in Bombay, and I mean that in the best way.  A reclusive pianist, a Bollywood star, a repressed artist, a Nick Carraway-ish photographer: the cast is appropriately superficial and self-destructive and yet, as we -- and Karan Seth, the outsider-turned-insider -- discover, there's depth and passion and fear.

I wasn't sure what I was getting into as the jacket blurb is fairly vague (but mentions Fitzgerald, which caught my interest).  There is a sort of Fitzgerald feel to the novel -- the glitzy tragedy of those who invite heartbreak and disaster -- but Shanghvi managed to make (most) of the characters real enough that I still felt for them.  A kind of frenetic sadness infuses the story, which is part bildungsroman, part crime thriller, part celebrity expose. 
There's a real crudity in the writing but I found it emphasized the frenzy of celebrity, the repressed sexual nature of the characters and the world they lived in.  Sensitive readers will likely be turned off by the language and at times it felt nearly misogynistic but isn't entirely out-of-place given the tone of the novel.

Whereas Shanghvi's narrative prose had me in swoons, I found his dialogue stiff, stilted, and unbelievable.  I think the attempt was to make the characters sound superficial but it read, for me, inauthentic and archaic.  (Shanghvi has the characters using some very odd, dated slang and I kept flipping to the front of the book to see if this was a problem with translation.)  Honestly, it felt like two different people were at work in this book.

At times, the novel felt a little long: enormous day-to-day detail around some events and then a leap of four years or ten years.  The expansion and growth of the characters was appealing, but for me, the story would have had more oomph if it stopped sooner.  In this case, the pathetic ends weren't poignant or moving, but simply sad, draining the tension that had been so deliciously built up. ( )

The protagonist of The Lost Flamingoes of Bombay, 25-year-old Karan, came to Bombay "in search of images that would reveal its most sublime, secret stories" (6). This revelation is also the aim of the novel, which follows Karan and his unexpected associates. Karan meets reclusive Samar Arora, a former child prodigy who decided to get out of the limelight while his musical career was still at his peak, on an assignment from India Chronicle. Samar introduces Karan to Zaira, a beautiful, but shy Bollywood actress famous enough to be known only by her first name. Zaira sends Karan on a question to the Chor Bazaar, where he comes across his eventual lover, Rhea Dalal, a homemaker who gave up a promising artistic career for her husband.

A writer has to be pretty gutsy to kill off one of his novel's most sympathetic characters a third of the way through it, even if his story is based on a real life murder. Honestly I wasn't sure whether the The Lost Flamingoes of Bombay would hold up once Zaira was no longer an active participant in its story. Luckily, it does. Zaira also continues to be a driving force in the novel even at the end of its story years after her death.

I was particularly taken with this passage:
"Karan found that over time he had not come to forget Zaira, as conventional wisdom would have him believe; rather, he had come to remember her better. Her particulars were now sharp and resplendent, like the head of a spear. Countless details fretted in the air like disturbed mites before they slowly congealed to form something composite and solid, a thing that stood in direct, cavalier opposition to the haze of memory.
"Reluctantly, sadly, he had come to accept that a human being was composed not only of everything that he possessed but also of all that he had lost" (293).

This first novel, centering on the murder of a Bollywood star and the miscarriage of justice that followed, is really the coming-of-age story of Karan Seth, a gifted young photographer new to Bombay. The friendships he forms and the disillusionments he suffers form a fairly conventional narrative. Shanghvi's Bombay isn't quite vivid enough for the central role it's meant to play in the story, but his characters are engaging. ( )

Shanghvi's prose is so laden with adjectives and metaphors that it is actually quite a triumph that the characters and plot come through at all. His descriptions are generally awkward (sometimes cringingly so), but occasionally poetic and apt. The same goes for his dialogue -- most of the time leaden and implausible, but occasionally moving and heartfelt. The writing made me want to hate this book, but I found myself drawn to the characters despite myself. Still, not recommended unless you have a lot of patience or an unquenchable thirst for descriptions of Bombay.

[full review here: http://spacebeer.blogspot.com/2010/12/lost-flamingoes-of-bombay-by-siddharth.htm... ] ( )