Maximum City
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Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found is a narrative nonfiction book by Suketu Mehta, published in 2004, about the city of Mumbai, India. It was published in hardcover by Random House's Alfred A. Knopf imprint. When released in paperback, it was published by Vintage, a subdivision of Random House.
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[edit] Awards
Maximum City was a 2005 Pulitzer Prize finalist and winner of the Kiriyama Prize [1], an award given to books that foster a greater understanding of the nations and peoples of the Pacific Rim and South Asia. The magazine The Economist named Maximum City one of its books of the year for 2004.
[edit] Plot Summary
The book combines elements of memoir, travel writing as well as socio-political analysis of the history and people of Mumbai. Mehta interweaves details about his childhood in the city then known as Bombay with his experience of returning to the city as an adult, as well as a parent and resident. His family left Mumbai in 1977, settling in the predominantly Indian Jackson Heights section of Queens, in New York City. The author describes the alienation he feels from both countries, since he is neither completely American nor Indian. This conflict can be common amongst Indians who have immigrated from India to Western countries. Please see Desi to better understand the Indian diaspora.
Mehta's return to Mumbai details his frustration with everyday day life in a developing nation. Having become accustommed to the conveniences of American life (ie - running water, sewers, always available power), he must be taught how to scam, cheat and beat a system that doesn't have enough supply to meet the residents's needs. Mehta mentions that Mumbai only has enough water for seventy percent of its population. He frankly describes the slums and how they can crop up anywhere, even alongside the railroad tracks. This is where the book begins to veer from memoir/travelogue to more of a biography of the city itself.
In explaining the slums and squatting, Mehta delves into the politics of modern Mumbai: the party divisions along Hindu versus Muslim lines, the criminal Mumbai underworld and the impact of the shocking 1993 Bombay bombings. He meets with murderous gangsters as well as prominent politician Bal Thackeray of the nationalist Shiv Sena party to give the reader the fullest view of a city seemingly too large to have boundaries.
[edit] Reviewers' Quotes
“Stunning . . . the account–fierce, engaged, coruscating–of a curious outsider who became, for two years, an intimate insider . . . [Mehta] explores the underside of the city with the inquisitiveness of a voyeur, the sensibility of a poet and the zeal of a private investigator. Mehta is none of those things and yet, like the best writers, he is all of them.” – Shashi Tharoor, Los Angeles Times Book Review
“Mehta is an urban ethnographer with an acute sensitivity to the peculiarities of his city . . . This fidelity to his interlocutors, and to their detail and circumstance, as much as the intelligence and brightness of Mehta’s own prose, makes Maximum City an extraordinary debut – a debut that will rival Arundhati Roy’s in fiction.” – The Nation
“In Maximum City, Suketu Mehta has given us a brilliant book. He writes fearlessly about the horror and wonder that is Bombay. One by one, he reveals its multiple personalities: maleficent Bombay, bountiful Bombay, beckoning temptress of hope, manufacturer of despair–city of dreams and nightmare city. Best of all, reading this book helps one understand why Bombay can be an addiction.” – Rohinton Mistry, author of Family Matters and A Fine Balance
“Mehta writes with a Victorian novelist’s genius for character, detail, and incident, but his voice is utterly modern. Like its subject, this is a sprawling banquet of a book, one of the most intimate and moving portraits of a place I have read.” – Jhumpa Lahiri, author of The Namesake and Interpreter of Maladies
“Quite extraordinary – Mehta writes about Bombay with an unsparing ferocity born of his love, which I share, for the old pre-Mumbai city which has now been almost destroyed by corruption, gangsterism and neo-fascist politics, its spirit surviving in tiny moments and images which he seizes upon as proof of the survival of hope. The quality of his investigative reportage, the skill with which he persuades hoodlums and murderers to open up to him, is quite amazing. It’s the best book yet written about that great, ruined metropolis, my city as well as his, and it deserves to be very widely read.” – Salman Rushdie, author of Midnight’s Children and The Moor’s Last Sigh
“[Mehta’s] sophisticated voice conveys postmodern Bombay with a carefully calibrated balance of wit and outrage, harking back to such great Victorian urban chroniclers as Dickens and Mayhew.” – Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“In his new book, Suketu Mehta writes an epic biography of his childhood city, and it’s as luscious as a cold mango lassi on a sweltering day . . . Through his fluid writing, he establishes the culture and modern history of a city torn by Hindu-Muslim strife, but where culture and beauty still flourish . . . A vivid and textured portrait of Bombay.” – New York Post
“The passions and secrets of the throbbing megalopolis come alive as Suketu Mehta steps into its back alleys and dance bars, its fantasy factories and drawing rooms . . . Every city has its chronicler . . . now Bombay gets its Boswell, his chronicle as sprawling and enchanting as his subject.” – India Today
“Suketu Mehta has done the impossible: he has captured the city of Bombay on the page, and done it in technicolor. Like Zola’s Paris and the London of Dickens, it will be difficult for me to visit Bombay without thinking of Maximum City and the enormous delight I had when I inhabited its pages.” – Abraham Verghese, author of My Own Country and The Tennis Partner
“Along with V.S. Naipaul’s India: A Million Mutinies Now, Maximum City is probably the greatest non-fiction book written about India.” –Akhil Sharma, author of An Obedient Father
“Maximum City is the remarkable debut of a major new Indian writer. Humane and moving, sympathetic but outspoken, it’s a shocking and sometimes heartbreaking book, teeming with extraordinary stories. It is unquestionably one of the most memorable non-fiction books to come out of India for many years, and there is little question that it will become the classic study of Bombay.” – William Dalrymple, author of White Mughals and In Xanadu
“Like one of Bombay’s teeming chawls, Maximum City is part nightmare and part millennial hallucination, filled with detail, drama and a richly varied cast of characters. In his quest to plumb both the grimy depths and radiant heights of the continent that is Bombay, Suketu Mehta has taken travel writing to an entirely new level. This is a gripping, compellingly readable account of a love affair with a city: I couldn’t put it down.” – Amitav Ghosh, author of In an Antique Land and The Glass Palace
“Brave, honest, and addictive: Maximum City is narrative non-fiction at its best. Mehta de-exoticizes as he mesmerizes, finding humanity in killers, actresses, and civil servants, and leading us inexorably to the sight of our our own reflections in the fractured mirror of his great city, Bombay.” – Mohsin Hamid, author of Moth Smoke
