Capital

Reviews / Votes

A beautifully written portrait of a corrupt, violent and traumatised city growing so fast it is almost unrecognisable to its own inhabitants. An astonishing tour de force by a major writer at the peak of his powers -- WILLIAM DALRYMPLE A terrific portrait of Delhi right now and hits a lot of nails on the head -- SALMAN RUSHDIE * * Vogue * * Lyrical and haunting * * International New York Times * * Achingly beautiful . . . and cleverly tangential * * Financial Times * * Intense, lyrical, erudite and powerful * * Observer * * Important . . . His lyrical encounters with a wide range of modern Delhiites reveal a novelist's ear and are beautifully sketched * * Telegraph * * Dasgupta peels back the layers of denial with insight, humanity and beautiful writing. He exposes festering wounds buts succeeds in fascinating rather than repelling * * The Times * * A remarkable and exhaustive account * * Independent * * Personal, original and vivid * * New Internationalist * * A remarkably elegant work whose rich style and sweep often brings to mind V S Naipaul's A Million Mutinies Now * * New Statesman * * Dasgupta's combination of reportage, political critique and oral history is mordant rather than dyspeptic, sorrowful rather than castigatory. But what makes it more than a local study, what makes it so haunting, is that its textured, tart accounts of the privatisation of public space, of the incestuous relationship between the political and business classes, of the precarity that renders daily life so fraught all apply as much to Britain and the west as they do to the Indian capital * * Guardian * * Capital is constructed around a series of mesmerising interviews . . . Among many lively episodes in Dasgupta's appropriately large, sprawling and populous book is one describing the experience of driving in Delhi * * Spectator * * Rana Dasgupta is the most unexpected and original Indian writer of his generation -- SALMAN RUSHDIE [Dasgupta has] a gift for sentences of lancing power and beauty * * New Yorker * * Dasgupta's eye is keen, and his sensitivity to small moments takes this extraordinary, tender book linger in the mind like a series of striking short stories. In Delhi, ruined, embattled, and alarmingly mutant, he sees the globalised city of the future * * Prospect * *