Mini-Book Review: A Case of Exploding Mangoes

Yikes! This is waaay over­due (sorry about that) The Mini-Book Expo concept is simple, yet I man­aged to blow Rule # 4:

Blog it.

* Post some­thing about the book with­in a month of get­ting it

So, without fur­ther ado, here’s my mini review!

Title: A Case of Explod­ing Mangoes
Author: Mohammed Hanif
Pub­lish­er: Ran­dom House (Canada)

Quick Takes

Pre-read thoughts: This might be inter­est­ing. A newsy event (death of Pakistan’s lead­er) related as a mys­tery. And oth­er reviews seem to think it mildly amus­ing. Who knows, I may learn something.

Part-way through: This is one weird-ass book.  There’s not enough of a dis­tinc­tion, so maybe the humour is subtle. Yeah, that’s it. Or iron­ic satire…hmm, but wait, it’s based on real­ity so maybe there’s some­thing here. I mean, our main char­ac­ter (the son of a dis­graced (or not) fam­ous gen­er­al) is vari­ably infatu­ated with a mil­it­ary academy room-mate who’s gone AWOL.

Then there’s this crow. A cursed crow. A crow car­ry­ing a curse against the dic­tat­or of the country!

Basic­ally, there’s a lot of motiv­a­tion in a lot of char­ac­ters built up by this point. But the pace of the plot devel­op­ment was slow! I could have rid­den a Pakistani Pachy­derm faster than this book developed. Or maybe that was delib­er­ate — an invis­ible homage to the slower pace of life in Pakistan.

But I’m still engaged, that’s a good thing.

The End: Ok. It’s over. Not a bad read. I learned a bit more about Pakistan. I learned more about the events sur­round­ing the death of Gen­er­al Zia. I learned that I could read a book that was­n’t a fast-paced Tom Clan­cey action adven­ture, and still pull some enjoy­ment from it.

My Take: Frankly, not my cup of tea. It was an inter­est­ing read, espe­cially over the sum­mer, but not my nor­mal fare. I found myself want­ing to skip ahead as the plot unfol­ded; yet hes­it­ant to do so as there was the prom­ise of bril­liance here. Meh, it did­n’t happen.