Welcome to Litsy!

Living in a perpetual flinch resonated with me. #anxiety #selfesteem

For a debut novel, this has been a delightful read. I‘m enjoying the narration and love the main character. I heard they are turning this book into a movie. I‘m excited to see what they do with it.

I thoroughly enjoyed the apotheosis of the 12-year-old narrator from extravagant child into recalcitrant puberty. (The older one gets the more mythologized our youth becomes.) I loved his observations as a 1st generation American child of immigrants from India. The contrasts of exotic Orientalist desires with suburban Ohio was entertaining, but I thought the protagonist's hedonism bordered on a disturbing and undiagnosed psychosis.

"I've been creating my own whimsy--or at least my heart has-- and that whimsy has led me to exhibit my artistic self in its most unfettered state. The world can be as uncommonly beautiful as you want it to be as long as you've given yourself over to that whimsy, however melancholy and lonely it may be sometimes."

Quote paired with a Pierre et Gilles photograph.

"Books are much better companions to me than people. A book's content never changes, and yet it is always intriguing; something you read can mean something completely different to you at a different time. This is not the case with my classmates. If I've learned anything, it's that people can be devastating at any given moment."

Painting by Giovanni Giacometti.

Regarding the narrator's pundit at his Temple in Ohio: "He had an obsidian comb-over. And he transitions from Hindi to Sanskrit to English so quickly that I often don't know which he is trying to speak. It's Hinglishskrit."

And about his mother: "Even though my mother has come to the Midwest from the most exotic and dangerous lands, Ohio can scare the hell out of her. India may be full of man-eating tigers, but Ohio is full of Ohioans."