2009-06-12 - 10:56 p.m.
Dear Rana Dasgupta
Thank you for making your new book good.
I enjoyed Tokyo Cancelled so much that I worried about whether or not you could write a book that would measure up to that. I realized that, if you didn't, my disappointment would border on despair. Happily, your new book Solo is, like Tokyo Cancelled, shaping up to be one of those books that is so good that it restores my faith in the future of fiction.
(Harmless aside, I bought Solo within about a month of its release. In the past, I've bought and rented new CDs and movies as promptly, but this is the very first book that I've anticipated the publishing of and then bought up as soon as I could. And I hope that you will take this as a compliment.)
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Dear Rana Dasgupta
Please change your agent. Tokyo Cancelled and Solo are scandalously good books. They should be selling badgillions of copies and you should be spoiled and famous. Instead, I find that not even my bookiest friends have heard of you and Solo is barely available for sale online and, inexplicably and confusingly, also under the name of Untitled Novel II.
I blame your agent. Please change whoever that may be at the earliest opportunity.
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Dear Rana Dasgupta
One of the things I've realized that I like about your books is that I really can't tell whether or not you like your characters. Mentally running down my list of favorite books, it's obvious to me that I prefer my heroes undeniably flawed. But, even so, it's usually pretty clear whether authors love or despise the characters of their creation. In Solo, I really can't tell if you like the blind retired chemist, the gangster and his girlfriend, or the violin prodigy who lives in a ghost town. And this makes Solo that much more interesting.
(Harmless aside, I intend to do some rereading in Tokyo Cancelled in search of examples of this in that book as well. As I almost never reread, I hope that you'll take this as a compliment.)
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Dear Rana Dasgupta
You use all my favorite devices. Tokyo Cancelled delighted me with its use of frame tales and reminded me why I love them. At this point in Solo, each character's story has wandered so far away from everyone else's that I wonder how they could possibly tie up together again. I love it when stories do that. When they veer off in unexpected directions and then come back together at the end. (Is there an actual word for this?)
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Dear Rana Dasgupta
Please be my pen pal.
