Book Review: Serious Men by Manu Joseph

I picked up 'Serious Men' almost 4 years after 'The Illicit Happiness of Other People'. 'Illicit' was perhaps the book of the year for me in 2013 and 'Serious Men' was purchased in a post 'Illicit' fugue. Reading Joseph is as sublime as watching Tendulkar bat or any of the 2 Ronaldo's play soccer. There isn't a man who was more ordained to be an author than Joseph and 'Serious Men' - his first book - is the reading equivalent of watching Tendulkar bat at 16 or a young Cristiano amaze Old Trafford on a goalless debut; a time when the joy of doing the job overtook the job itself.

Surely, 'Illicit' is a much surer book, funnier and a more tangy plot but 'Serious Men' is a serious masterpiece, darkly comic in parts, poignant in others. The characters are so real, that you could almost touch them in Joseph's pages.

There are a handful of authors whose every book I shall read and pick up (Zaidi, Higashino, Levy/ Scott Clarke, Rutherford) and Joseph is one of them - so poetic that his writing might as well be music.

Unmissable.

Book Review: Redeployment by Phil Klay

Redeployment by Phil Klay is a collection of short stories about US armymen fighting or recovering from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. I picked this book up on an Afghan war buying binge and Klay entertained me enough not to regret the purchase. The stories are heartfelt and breezy reads; however, most of them do not really give you a twist/ pang at the end like classic short stories do. Neither is Klay at the level of say a Jhumpa Lahiri to get away with a meandering story that ends without really ending.

Even so, this is an important book for depicting the lives of men caught in a war they did not start. I particularly liked the story about the water treatment plant in Iraq and of a US bureaucrat trying to fix it battling Iraqi culture and Sunni-Shia rivarlries.

Not a must-read, but a can-be-read.