The Big Peat
Darth Buddha
- Joined
- Apr 9, 2016
- Messages
- 3,760
When I found out about Kundo Wakes Up, sometime last year, I hit the pre-order button like it said “please collect a free million pounds”. I had utterly fallen in love with Saad Z Hossain’s The Gurkha and the Lord of Tuesday, so finding out about a sequel made my day. I waited and waited with something in the neighbourhood of patience for it to drop.
Now’s it here. What’s there to say?
Kundo is an artist living in Chittagong. He used to have it all – fame, a burgeoning Karma point account, a wife. But the wife’s gone and the urge to paint has dried up. The points are still there but with the sea coming to swallow the city, what good does that do?
Then one day he finds a note from the private eye he hired to find his wife and it all get’s a bit mental. Which is very much what I hoped would happen as a reader, after all. That’s what I was here for. Something a bit weird, a bit disturbed, a bit wonderful in the not entirely positive meaning of the way. Something gone a bit J.G. bleeping Ballard, to borrow from a great source of profanity.
I got that and it made me indecently happy.
I have to say, I wish I’d got it a little quicker. The beginning of Kundo Wakes Up feels very much like some long, drawn-out piece on the literary end of the scale, firmly fixed on the artist’s internal doubts and descent in the wake of his wife’s leaving (over a year before the book starts). It takes a few chapters for the chaotic digging into secrets and caustic dialogue to really get going. Kundo, bless him, is a very amiable seeming type, but he does also appear to be a wet rag of a man. The second coming of the Lord of Tuesday this ain’t.
Fortunately, he is soon enough surrounded by a crew of utter hooligans. Fara’s just your everyday, girl-next-door, impoverished single mum, a collection of hard edges and wistful yearnings held together by weary strained tolerance. Hafez is an old gangster and revolutionary, a stylish bad matherchod who rages against the dying of the light with the help of speed patches to stop the shakes. And Dead Gola is an old game coder and hacker who’s been rendered more or less irrelevant to the rest of the world by her addictions.
Together, they find a mystery that kept me turning pages, slowly but surely. Enjoying the journey and wondering what the actual f*ck was going on took up too much time for it to be a compulsive page turner, but it was no less enjoyable for that. Hossain has a real gift for lining up the weirdnesses available to the future, particularly one with djinn in, to the very basic human needs and desires that don’t appear to be going away anytime soon.
Basically, everything in this book is how I think it should be bar two things. It’s got hugely entertaining characters, snappy writing, a vivid sense of time and place, and a deeply compelling plot. Unfortunately, the things I didn’t gel with are quite important. One, as mentioned, was the beginning. The other was the ending. It’s pretty difficult to describe one’s disagreements with an ending while keeping to a mild spoilers only policy, so I shall simply say I found it abrupt and deliberately undramatic. I almost liked it for that, in fact. But was mainly nonplussed.
More than that I can’t say, so I encourage you to simply read the damn book and come discuss it with me. Kundo Wakes Up lacks the blood and thunder of its companion, The Gurkha and the Lord of Tuesday, but it still a thoroughly entertaining and thought provoking piece of fiction. So start buying Hossain’s novellas. I’ll be astonished if you regret it.
(this review originally appeared at Kundo Wakes Up by Saad Z Hossain)
Now’s it here. What’s there to say?
Kundo is an artist living in Chittagong. He used to have it all – fame, a burgeoning Karma point account, a wife. But the wife’s gone and the urge to paint has dried up. The points are still there but with the sea coming to swallow the city, what good does that do?
Then one day he finds a note from the private eye he hired to find his wife and it all get’s a bit mental. Which is very much what I hoped would happen as a reader, after all. That’s what I was here for. Something a bit weird, a bit disturbed, a bit wonderful in the not entirely positive meaning of the way. Something gone a bit J.G. bleeping Ballard, to borrow from a great source of profanity.
I got that and it made me indecently happy.
I have to say, I wish I’d got it a little quicker. The beginning of Kundo Wakes Up feels very much like some long, drawn-out piece on the literary end of the scale, firmly fixed on the artist’s internal doubts and descent in the wake of his wife’s leaving (over a year before the book starts). It takes a few chapters for the chaotic digging into secrets and caustic dialogue to really get going. Kundo, bless him, is a very amiable seeming type, but he does also appear to be a wet rag of a man. The second coming of the Lord of Tuesday this ain’t.
Fortunately, he is soon enough surrounded by a crew of utter hooligans. Fara’s just your everyday, girl-next-door, impoverished single mum, a collection of hard edges and wistful yearnings held together by weary strained tolerance. Hafez is an old gangster and revolutionary, a stylish bad matherchod who rages against the dying of the light with the help of speed patches to stop the shakes. And Dead Gola is an old game coder and hacker who’s been rendered more or less irrelevant to the rest of the world by her addictions.
Together, they find a mystery that kept me turning pages, slowly but surely. Enjoying the journey and wondering what the actual f*ck was going on took up too much time for it to be a compulsive page turner, but it was no less enjoyable for that. Hossain has a real gift for lining up the weirdnesses available to the future, particularly one with djinn in, to the very basic human needs and desires that don’t appear to be going away anytime soon.
Basically, everything in this book is how I think it should be bar two things. It’s got hugely entertaining characters, snappy writing, a vivid sense of time and place, and a deeply compelling plot. Unfortunately, the things I didn’t gel with are quite important. One, as mentioned, was the beginning. The other was the ending. It’s pretty difficult to describe one’s disagreements with an ending while keeping to a mild spoilers only policy, so I shall simply say I found it abrupt and deliberately undramatic. I almost liked it for that, in fact. But was mainly nonplussed.
More than that I can’t say, so I encourage you to simply read the damn book and come discuss it with me. Kundo Wakes Up lacks the blood and thunder of its companion, The Gurkha and the Lord of Tuesday, but it still a thoroughly entertaining and thought provoking piece of fiction. So start buying Hossain’s novellas. I’ll be astonished if you regret it.
(this review originally appeared at Kundo Wakes Up by Saad Z Hossain)
