Just finished reading Tokyo Cancelled by Rana Dasgupta and it is a wonderful book. The jacket says that this is about 13 people stranded at an airport on the way to Tokyo who start telling each other stories to pass the time. What the jacket omits to tell you is that these are thirteen completely mad stories, full of magic realism and psychedelia worthy of Marquez and sometimes, bordering on Borges. Although Dasgupta does sometimes overdo the “look-at-my-sentence-con-struc-tion” bit, he’s always riveting and even though like most short stories these too end abruptly, they are fun to read from start to finish. The best part of the book is that Dasgupta doesn’t bother with even a cursory examination of the relationships between the 13 passengers. This book is all about the stories.
This is an amazing book and should be read by everyone who likes to read. Once you are done with the book, you can entertain yourself by flipping to a random page, choosing a random sentence and reading it just for the pure pleasure of feeling the vibrations of words that were put together with care. i.e.The sun had nearly set and the last rays on the walls hummed at a frequency that created a distasteful reverberation in his skull. His mouth was dry and the insistent sounds of the evening crows settled on his bloated tongue with an acrid taste.