The dialogue is often interesting, with some intriguing touches involving the titular “Em” sometimes borrowing American turns of phrases, but the non-dialog prose moves from banal triteness to trying to engage that register of cleverness, that tradition that runs from G.V.

This book is lifeless, cold, with a tinge of misogyny and general awfulness. Maybe I wasn’t in the right mood to read this, but at this point I feel as if I am merely picking reasons not to stick to my initial impression.

This fits, in turn the blurb by Kiran Desai, who made a career (and got a booker winning book) out of offering a pale simulacrum of specific tones and moods popular in English-language Indian fiction (I have some remarks on that genre here). When the mother dies (it’s not really a big spoiler), Pinto’s narrator slips into a slightly different tone, offering a simulacrum of moving, elegiac narration. The book is about a mother and her son (there’s a daughter too, but Jerry Pinto, in what is symptomatic for the whole book, includes her as a kind of afterthought, most of the time, as a plus one for the frankly unbearable narrator and protagonist. There are indeed moments where the book comes close to being moving they are all towards the end. This is a supposedly “profoundly moving” book – so when I tell you it’s mostly annoying, trite and sometimes offensive, I may be in the minority of readers. The book is covered in huge blurbs, by the likes of Rushdie, Ghosh and Kiran Desai (well ok). I thought this novel was awfully mediocre, on a multitude of levels – but it comes with a big bag of praise. Oh and it has one of the most beautiful covers I’ve seen in a new book.Pinto, Jerry (2012), Em and the Big Hoom, VikingĪh, man. So while I may not have ended feeling that I’d learned anything significant about her poor family, reading this brought Em wholly and unforgettably alive. She’s capricious, vulnerable, intense and outrageous. He perfectly captures Em’s free-wheeling and inventive way of looking at the world and her own history. This novel unfolds through conversations and Jerry Pinto is an absolute master of conversation. She’s mentally ill, swinging from hilarious and outrageous good humour to such intolerable depths of pain that make the term ‘depression’ hopelessly inadequate.īut she’s drawn with such affection and honesty that you can’t help but love her as much as do her long-suffering family. Perhaps that’s because of the immense power, charisma and tragedy of the central character, Imelda Mendes or Em, as she’s known to her children. I never felt particularly affected by their suffering and loss, which is substantial. What I mean by that is that the narrator, his sister and even his father, the ‘Big Hoom’ of the title never seem to become much more than the supporting characters that they are. It’s deeply touching but in some important parts the emotional engagement is lacking.

Em and the big hoom review