Indian Winter

I'm a sucker for any novel written by a poet. The dense amalgamation of poetry given room to breathe across chapters. And even as the narrator muses “a fiction of carefully crafted language with flowing sentences and paragraphs always makes me suspicious” I found the language hypnotizing.

A queer poet, uncertain or maybe ambivalent about his current relationship, and learning of the death of a former lover, escapes to India. It is the country of his parents and he recounts the sun of Varkala, the loneliness of Bengaluru, and the doom of Hyderabad. It's a queer, brown, Eat, Pray, Love — a travelogue filled with wry details of the many people he encounters that nonetheless reveals that “few are the people that live close, and listen hard.”