To encounter V.S. Naipaul as a minor character in a work of fiction is a major excitement, but the cast of characters in Jeet Thayil’s dazzling and dizzying second novel, The Book of Chocolate Saints, is so eclectic, and the literary milieu it creates so ominously familiar that, by the book’s end, Naipaul’s cameo seems like its most perfunctory trick.

The book also features — in much more depth and detail than that of Naipaul — the troubled lives of the Bombay [Mumbai] poets of the 1970s and ’80s, a revered and paradoxically doomed clique, of which the protagonist, painter and poet Newton Frances Xavier, is a part and which also includes Arun Kolatkar, Nissim Ezekiel and Dom Moraes. If that wasn’t enough, towards its middle, the book also boasts an oddly satisfying and deeply affecting three-page diatribe that limns the mode of suicide of more than a couple dozen real-life literary figures, from Sylvia Plath to Anne Sexton and from Randall Jarrell to Yasunari Kawabata. Then there are a couple dozen other cast members — parents, wives, children, friends, teachers, colleagues, well-wishers, enemies, lovers and stalkers of Newton Frances Xavier.

The best part about Jeet Thayil’s dazzling and dizzying sophomore novel is its book within a book

The Book of Chocolate Saints is a book within a book. Parts of it are presented as an ‘oral biography’ of Newton’s life, compiled by his admirer Dismas Bambai who is a journalist. This fan-turned-biographer has set himself the task of interviewing everyone who knew Newton in one capacity or the other over the course of his life — from his delirious mother in a mental asylum, to his school teachers who claim to have first discovered Newton’s talents, to his self-aggrandising Oxford professors and a coterie of lovers, wives and friends. These compendiums of interviews are interjected with chapters written in the third person that take us from Goa to England to New York to Bombay, charting Newton’s ascent to fame, his days of zany stardom and his inevitable doom upon his return to India — after many, many years — for his final show.

The sections containing the polyphonic, posthumous interviews were, for me, the most exhilarating part of this book. Throughout I found myself racing ahead to read these sections. Thayil uses his gift as a poet to fashion each of these voices with precision and verve. While the other sections — told in the third person — give us a sense of the chronological events in Newton’s life, these non-linear, often contradictory and divulging interviews show us Newton as a deeply flawed and hence utterly real and relatable person. Estranged relatives, abandoned wives, angered children and competitive rivals — they all come together to narrate the story of the moribund life of the great painter and poet.

The other alternating sections are, however, not completely devoid of humour, empathy and Thayil’s signature stylistic strokes. He paints an alarming picture of India in the ’90s, grieving and crumbling under the weight of its colonial encumbrances; looted cultural histories, deprived of resources and its language and legacy relegated to the margins. Even when Newton abandons his home and moves to America, there is little promise of solace. The post 9/11 socio-political turmoil, from state surveillance down to brutal instances of street violence, is enough to make a brown body feel alienated and vulnerable. And hence when, after years of living reclusively in a foreign land, “India’s greatest living painter” finally returns home for his ultimate show, little does he know that he is also entering the final days of his life.

The kitchen was the bivouac of an insurgent army. Every surface had been colonised by objects that had nothing to do with cooking: a rotating globe, illustrations ripped from anatomy textbooks, toy Ambassador taxis from India, an obsolete desktop computer, a shelf of floppy disks, miscellaneous handwritten missives stuffed into folders. Making a cup of coffee was a philosophical manoeuvre. You had to take a position. You had to ask yourself, what is coffee? Why is it consumed? How far would I go for a cup?— Excerpt from the book

In form and style Thayil’s book is reminiscent of Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detective and even 2666, not in the least because it takes us deep into the labyrinths of the literary world and the secret lives of the ‘lost poets’, but also because it blurs the line between fact and fiction. In The Book of Chocolate Saints, Thayil creates a rollicking hybrid of history, biography, journalism, poetry and fiction, each lacking and never quite realised to satisfying effect, but yet at the same time never without a moment of heartfelt joy and literary finesse either. In creating a polyphonic and palimpsestic portrait of his dissolute, debauched and decadent hero, Thayil has written an ambitious and elegiac book. And while the work as a whole is pretty compelling, it pales in comparison to the thrilling little book contained within it.

The reviewer is a Karachi-based freelance writer

The Book of Chocolate Saints
By Jeet Thayil
Faber and Faber, UK
ISBN: 978-0571336104384pp.

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, May 20th, 2018