Book Tour/Review - We Of The Forsaken World by Kiran Bhat

WE OF THE FORSAKEN WORLD
By Kiran Bhat
Literary Fiction/Metaphysical Fiction

Synopsis: The Internet has connected – and continues to connect – billions of people around the world, sometimes in surprising ways. In his sprawling new novel, we of the forsaken world, author Kiran Bhat has turned the fact of that once-unimaginable connectivity into a metaphor for life itself.

In we of the forsaken world, Bhat follows the fortunes
of 16 people who live in four distinct places on the planet. The gripping stories include those of a man’s journey to the birthplace of his mother, a tourist town destroyed by an industrial spill; a chief’s second son born in a nameless remote tribe, creating a scramble for succession as their jungles are destroyed by loggers; a homeless, one-armed woman living in a sprawling metropolis who sets out to take revenge on the men who trafficked her; and a milkmaid in a small village of shanty shacks connected only by a mud and concrete road who watches the girls she calls friends destroy her reputation.

Like modern communication networks, the stories in, we of the forsaken world connect along subtle lines, dispersing at the moments where another story is about to take place. Each story is a parable unto itself, but the tales also expand to engulf the lives of everyone who lives on planet Earth, at every second, everywhere.

As Bhat notes, his characters “largely live their own lives, deal with their own problems, and exist independently of the fact that they inhabit the same space. This becomes a parable of globalization, but in a literary text.”

Bhat continues:  “I wanted to imagine a globalism, but one that was bottom-to-top, and using globalism to imagine new terrains, for the sake of fiction, for the sake of humanity’s intellectual growth.”

“These are stories that could be directly ripped from our headlines. I think each of these stories is very much its own vignette, and each of these vignettes gives a lot of insight into human nature, as a whole.”

we of the forsaken world takes pride of place next to such notable literary works as David Mitchell’s CLOUD ATLAS, a finalist for the prestigious Man Booker Prize for 2004, and Mohsin Hamid’s EXIT WEST, which was listed by the New York Times as one of its Best Books of 2017.

Bhat’s epic also stands comfortably with the works of contemporary visionaries such as Umberto Eco, Haruki Murakami, and Philip K. Dick.


My Thoughts:  This was a bit different from things I usually read and a bit hard for me to get into but I did enjoy it. Told using several different "voices" in a poetic way where everything kinda merges together somehow and doesn't seem like just a pile of short unrelated stories about living conditions from olden to the more modern ages and the availability of technology or the unavailability and how it affects the different areas.

I received a free copy in exchange for an honest review.

Amazon → https://amzn.to/2DQIclm

Barnes & Noble → https://bit.ly/2Lqe9Fi

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TEASER

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EXCERPT

“My people. Now speaks the man destined to
make the great cats bow to feet, now speaks the man who will lock eyes with the
sun. I have found our new land. Take your canoes and follow me. A new time for
our tribe has come.”

Not a single man found it in himself to raise
a weapon, nor did a single wife open her mouth. The eyes of the eternal shone
not from the skull but from the eyes of our chief’s first son. We believed that
the spirits had bestowed him with our future. He had the eyes of life and death
and life once more.

(Bhat, we, of the forsaken world… p.
191)

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Kiran Bhat was born in Jonesboro, Georgia to parents from villages in
Dakshina Kannada, India. An avid world traveler, polyglot, and digital
nomad, he has currently traveled to more than 130 countries, lived in 18
different places, and speaks 12 languages. He currently lives in
Melbourne, Australia.

Website  → http://iguanabooks.ca/