Let me know what you think if you ever do
I just finished reading Shalimar the Clown, in what I guess is a slightly similar genre in some ways, though it's much less heavily magical realist and has more political/thriller elements to it. It's by Salman Rushdie and it's very intense, with the various characters being pulled apart both by their difficult (and, often, violent) personal lives and by political turmoil, especially the war in Kashmir though numerous other 20th century conflicts also make important appearances. Rushdie isn't really a thriller or plot-centric writer, and he's much more about characters and storytelling than about plots and pacing, and it's definitely at its best when exploring the relationships between the characters, their psychology, their history, and the history and folklore of their backgrounds. If anything I'd have liked that to come through more strongly at the tail end of the book, but that's a minor flaw - there were certainly moments where the emotional weight of the book really hit through in a way that not many books manage, and it's that narrative method of essentially binding together pain and brutality with history and narrative in a way that makes it almost, but not quite, comprehensible that I think this book does really very well. Very powerful read.
