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minusfigures's review
3.0
I want to love this book, and I do love it in parts; there are phrases I've highlighted on almost every page. Overall however the isolation of particular phrases is not enough to give this book the weight it aspires to.
scarletohhara's review
3.0
As much as I love Iyer's prose and have this desire to inhale everything he writes, this was an incredibly hard book to finish.
I just couldn't identify with the protagonists - I am never a fan of protagonists who like to complicate their lives when it isn't necessary, and in this plot, it looked like that from the beginning. The love story didn't feel natural, the flow of the story wasn't smooth and John and Camille weren't making any sense.
I only finished the book because the prose is beautiful, as always.
I just couldn't identify with the protagonists - I am never a fan of protagonists who like to complicate their lives when it isn't necessary, and in this plot, it looked like that from the beginning. The love story didn't feel natural, the flow of the story wasn't smooth and John and Camille weren't making any sense.
I only finished the book because the prose is beautiful, as always.
kalikabali's review
4.0
It took me very long to get through this book. The love story that threads through the book, and the self-absorbed life of a grad student and his thesis became a bit tedious at times. But what really made it for me was the almost "academic" like discussion on sufi poetry. And the Fourth star in the rating is solely for the lovely bits and pieces of poems by Rumi and others (including Iyer himself) that pepper the book. This won't be to everyone's liking but the writing and the poems were worth the effort to keep up with the rest of the story.
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