What a comeback! Two decades later Pankaj Mishra has returned to fiction and we are LOVING it. This was such a great read, gripping, tense, just the right amount of poignancy. We want more!

I was disappointed that I found this quite a difficult and unsettling read. It is, however, well written with a somewhat convoluted plot.

I will say that the first half of this book is a little bit slow. There are parts of the book where I feel like it could have been condensed a little bit more. But I will say that if you do stick with this book you will be happy that you did. Because you will be rewarded overall with a pretty interesting and intriguing read.

This was an interesting read and I did enjoy the premise but being honest some parts of the book felt very long and they seemed to drag on. However, saying that I enjoyed the story and I thought the twists in the book were clever and an alkmost game changer for the plot. I just had some very small issues with the way some parts were written but that didn't take away from the enjoyment

What a remarkable book. I almost abandoned it during its first half, but then the author made it all worthwhile with a twist or two. Well written and I highly recommend this novel.

I chose to read this book because I have read very few Indian/Indian Origin authors based out of India. The story however was not for me. The first few chapters were very graphic and the imagery was hard for me to go past. I am sure the events might have actually occurred but I could not stomach it.
It is definitely not for people like me!

Run and Hide is about the juggernauts of Modern India and the associated moral bankruptcy.

Based on ideas explored in previous non-fiction essays Run and Hide follows three friends from humble origins set in Modern India as it races to become a Superpower. The characters are drawn from India's lower casts, poverty and associated shame. They enter the rat race to the top through the portal of success, India’s prestigious Indian Institute of Technology (IIT). Virendra, the Gordon Gecko of the trio becomes a successful billionaire financier. Aseem becomes a charismatic 'mover and shaker' in the literary world. - Both these characters make it big in the US and become cheerleaders of Modi’s increasingly autocratic, fascist yet capitalist India. The third character, Arun narrates the tale as he retreats to a Himalayan village working as a translator whilst looking after his sick mother.
He meets Alia, a writer from an elite, wealthy background, sourcing material for a book that seeks to expose crooked global elites. He moves to London with her and through her is reminded again of his inadequacies in social settings as she confidently moves in circles of privilege and looks on like a duck out of water.
The story becomes increasingly complex with plots and twists but is mainly centered on societal changes and the effects on the psyche as great wealth enters India's cast system.
Positives, this is a fictional insight into the reality of social structures that exist within India.
Negatives, It’s a bit of a rambling piece of fiction by a talented non-fiction writer and commentator

In Run and Hide, Arun Dwivedi tells the story of his life and how it intertwines with three other men he first meets when they are all students at the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Delhi.

It is framed as an account written to a young female author and influencer, Alia, who is researching a global financial scandal in which two of the four are implicated.

Arun’s parents have sacrificed much to give him this elite education. His impoverished childhood and his pressure to succeed are vividly evoked, as is the atmosphere of the small railway town where he grows up. Mishra captures the deadening daily humiliations and rare moments of beauty. The subtle depiction of Arun’s family and their strange, silent cohabitation is haunting.

He portrays a brutal hazing at IIT, and the different responses of Arun and the students from similarly deprived backgrounds as they begin to map out their futures, negotiating the shifting dynamics of friendship, jealousy and shame.

But in their lives after IIT, the sweep of the book is much broader and the writing less involving. Two take up careers in finance in the United States, while another becomes a prominent figure on the Delhi literary scene, and soon is embellishing his reputation worldwide. Arun is on the fringes of the literary scene, living a quiet, low-key life in comparison. His knowledge of the others is limited, he gives us an outsider’s perspective.

The narrative frame means Arun is recalling, and editing, his thoughts on events that are either at a physical or a temporal distance. He is playing to Alia's expectations. He is, at points, lecturing. (He is also, for our benefit, telling her things she already knows.)

Run and Hide has some powerful and moving writing. Much of the novel, though reads like a series of broadsheet columns, a disquisition on the changing politics and culture of India, and the Indian diaspora worldwide, with a few pop-culture references thrown in.

I kept thinking of how it might have been with a different narrative structure, if we were inside the heads, or walking alongside, the other characters. As it is, for me it didn’t fully come to life.
*
I received a copy of Run and Hide from the publisher via Netgalley.

I don't really like the tone of this novel. Additional I find the implementation of the 'you' to be a tired narrative device that doesn't really make the characters more 'real'.

I am not a stranger to Pankaj Mishra. I had a review copy of one of his early books, The Romantics, about 20 years ago. I remember I found it rather dull and uninspiring. I thought that I know a lot more about India now than I did way back in those early days. I figured that if he's still writing all these years later, maybe he's moved on and maybe this time he'd blow my socks off.

I don't think he has.

My feet remain firmly socked.

Run and Hide is a book of unremitting dullness. It rambles about all over the place without the slightest sense of delivering a story. It's very disappointing. Sorry, it just didn't work for me.

We start with three young men, freshers at New Delhi's IIT (Indian Institute of Technology) being hazed by the boys from the year above. It's pretty shocking. It's pretty explicit. The author is living a lie, passing off his more humble origins as a Brahmin heritage. It starts well and shows great promise and then heads off down a series of dead ends.

We skip forward in time. One of the boys has become a billionaire tech entrepreneur in the USA. He's corrupt and has an expensive taste for blonde Russian prostitutes. The other is a literary figure, writing books, pontificating about the world and society, and sleeping with a lot of women. And our narrator is a humble man, living with his mother in the Himalayas, translating books, and completely failing to deliver on the promise of his top of the pile education.

A lot of the book is directed to a woman who has been asked to write a book about the narrator's two friends. She's wealthy, sexy, highly-respected in her field, hot on social media - oh, and a Muslim who drinks and sleeps with men.

If I hadn't read the synopsis, I don't think I would have followed this at all. And when I got to the end, I wondered why I'd bothered. I couldn't relate to any of these characters.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publishers for my copy.

This is a vivid description of Indian life and its complicated and often brutal caste system. It is a story in two parts (pre-36% and post-36%) and somewhat disjointed with disparate and often cruel characters. It reads as an autobiography although the author states it is a work of fiction. It makes for a difficult read at times and is not for the faint hearted.

Thank you to both Netgalley and the publisher for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

This is a book about Arun Dwivedi, who is about to enrol in the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology. It tells of his childhood in Deoli, then his education at the IIT. It also recounts stories about his friends Aseem Thakur and Virendra Das, that he meets and how they affect his life.
He ends up as a translator living in Ranipur, in the Himalayas.

Another character is Alia, a female writer and influencer, who is piecing together the story of a global financial scandal, interviewing Arun and his friends.

What I particularly like about this book is the new insights into life in modern India for both the university educated and those that aren’t.
The book shows the effect of being a lower caste person on the attitudes to education and life in general.
The author uses the contrasts of these effects to show some extremes of behaviour and their results.
In a way the book also shows how difficult it is for anyone not of the most recent generation to fit into the modern world.

Pankaj Mishra is an experienced, accomplished author and this shows in this work.
I enjoyed this book more and more as the story progressed, with some surprises towards the end.

Excellent story, fascinating characters, Bang up to date!

I like that this book forces you engage. It's not a light read, you need all your senses. I enjoyed reading this a lot.

Fans of Mohsin Hamid and The White Tiger will
enjoy this book. I loved how current it was and the weaving of current affairs e.g. British politics, politicians and celebrities. I also loved following the journey between India and London. However overall I didn’t connect to the book and couldn’t quite figure out what the author wanted to achieve.

This book was so gripping! The writing really appealed to me and the research was stark. Highly recommend.

Interesting semi-autobiography - underprivileged students at IIT make it in the world. Very informative and eye opening.

Panjak Mishra is an Indian essayist, non-fiction writer and novelist

He seems best known for his 2017 non-fiction book “An Age of Anger: A History of the Present” – a book which was written as an explicit argument against pro-liberalism writers such as Fukayama (and his “end of history”) and Huntingdon (and his “clash of civilisations”) – it seems (from some quick research) to have a basic thesis that the various nationalist movements (from ISIS to Modi to Brexit to Trump) are a response to globalisation in the sense that unresolved Western issues arising from capitalism, individualism and secularism are now spreading across the world.

On a personal level he moved to a Himalayan village in 1992 (aged 23) where he wrote essays and reviews for literary magazines and has written about travels in Tibet.

This novel seems to be a novelistic examination of non-fiction ideas, with a partly auto-biographical element.

The book’s first party narrator (the book effectively told to a single recipient) is Arun. He grew up in a remote Indian backwater but the pushing and dedication of his parents, his own abilities and some sleight of hand (changing his name to imply he is of a higher Caste) leads him to success in hyper-competitive national examinations and a place at the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology in Delhi, just at a time when Indians are starting to take advantage of such degrees to make their fortunes overseas in the burgeoning financial and IT industries.

There he meets two other students – both also from difficult backgrounds (one a low-Caste Indian) – and despite fierce bullying as part of their initiations as new students at IIT we find out that both make it – one, Virenda, as a fabulously wealthy financial player (ironically working for the leader of their IIT bullies), the other (Aseem) as an influential author/influencer/think tank operator.

Arun though to Aseem’s despair works first for an upper class Indian literary journal and the opts for a life of simplicity, taking his mother (deserted by his father) to live with him in a remote Himalayan village, where he works translating obscure Hindi-language literary authors into English.

After a spectacular fall from grace of the financial players, Assem contacts Arun to introduce him to a near neighbour Alia – a beautiful, old-money social media activist and wannabe-writer who is trying to write an expose of the two financiers and wants to interview Arun and Alia and Arun then start a relationship which moves on to England and causes Assem to question all of his values.

The author’s themes, which largely mirror his non-fiction writings while also looking at the implications for individuals trying to navigate a world with race, gender, and class issues and who are torn between modernism and tradition, West and India, religion and secularism, invidualism and community, family and career – as well as a world which just when it seems to be finally opening up its promise of globalised liberal prosperity to them seems to be reverting to populism and nationalism.

"‘The terrible thing about the trampled-upon darkies like Virendra is that their claim upon the richness of the world came too late. Just before we entered the endgame of modernity all over the world. Every grand edifice of modernity – growing economies, political institutions, information ecosystems, trust between citizens – is collapsing today, and we all risk being buried alive by the flying debris.’"

My issue with the book though is that I felt myself distanced from the novel very early on.

The IIT section reminded me of books about Fraternity hazing (one bugbear of mine); there was far too much use of non-English words which I had to look up (another bugbear – albeit later on much of the Hindi is translated immediately afterwards, I could still not see this as adding anything but a sense of distance); the characters were ridiculously privileged (a third bugbear) and there was far too much name dropping and inclusion of IRL famous people (a fourth).

And little in the rest of the book changed.

So an interesting concept but not for me.