You searched for book_author:"M.G. Vassanji"
I’m intrigued, because there are only 4 other reviews of Amriika on Goodreads as I write this, yet the book is over 15 years old. What gives? Is this just not one of M.G. Vassanji’s more popular books? Or did everyone read it back before Goodreads and hasn’t gotten around to re-reading/reviewing it now?
In any event, I’ve really enjoyed some of Vassanji’s other books, but Amriika did not work as well for me. Although…
This is my first book of the year, and it took me quite some time to get into it.
Few things annoy me more than when an author decides to ignore such a useful stylistic conventions as using quotation marks to offset dialogue! I like quotation marks. It makes the book easier to parse and gives me a clear idea of who is saying what. I discarded Blindness for similar reasons. Had I not been…
On the back cover of my edition, there's a blurb from The Globe and Mail that calls the book "timeless." That is the most accurate single-word evaluation of The Assassin's Song.
Once you've plunged into the book and read a couple of chapters, you immediately get that sense of timelessness. M. G. Vassanji intersperses aspects of the "present day" with events in the thirteenth century and events from the narrator's childhood. The historical events…
I read and reviewed my first M.G. Vassanji novel in 2009, when I was nineteen years old, making it among one of the earliest reviews I wrote, about a year into this project. It’s wild, going back and reading those old reviews. Kara of 2009 was so young, and self-deprecating: “I suspect that when I revisit this book as an older, more experienced person, I will see additional facets of the story that escaped…