The Association of Small Bombs: Book Review

The Association of Small Bombs (2016), Viking Books
Pardon the pun, but I found Karan Mahajan's second novel, The Association of Small Bombs, to be a bit of a dud. I'm going to chalk this up to two things: (1) the book came so heavily recommended that it inevitably failed to live up to the hype, and more importantly, (2) if you're going to write about -and thereby stake a claim to- a minority experience, maybe put a little more than cursory googling into your research.

Neither disclaimer is a reflection on Mahajan's writing- which is equal parts richly indulgent and the model of restraint- but you can't stylize your way out of the burning trainwreck that is deconstructing the Muslim experience. Some throwaway lines and sentiments attributed to the Muslim characters are so familiar, so cliched, that you wonder if the author has based all his understanding of the conceptual landmine he is taking on not even on Right Wing media, but Hollywood fluff. I can only imagine that for a Muslim reader, parts of this book must have been the equivalent of watching Raj Koothrapalli from Big Bang Theory for me as an Indian living abroad.


While it would almost be too easy to offer up Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist as a shining example of telling the other side of the story right, Mahajan perhaps has a greater responsibility than Hamid to get it right- seeing as how he is writing about the inner life of a community that he neither belongs to nor appears to have any insightful experience of.

Without meaning to bandy about the term "cultural appropriation", I'm a firm believer in story tellers taking responsibility for the myths they propagate about communities, in writers not borrowing from a minority experience without a fair and impassioned understanding of the same, especially when said community is clearly being used as a big and easy touchpoint to lend global relevance to the text. 

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