Book: The Bitter Pill Social Club
Author: Rohan Dahiya
Genre: Fiction
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Pages: 314
Price: 399
Blurb:
Witness the private life of the world’s most beautiful
animals.
You know exactly who they are. The ones who walk right past club lines, who get what they want before they ask for it. It’s a familiar cast: the centre of attention, the shameless flirt, the loudmouth, the narcissistic writer. You’ve seen them all. You’ve felt their Gucci-anointed aura. Laughing and dancing. Kissing the wrong people at the wrong time. Swaying to their own beat. Going out every night they’re sad. Finding solace in the crowd in a city paved with mildly good intentions and cocaine lines. A city of smooth talkers, armchair activists, and the rich brats of Instagram. A place to talk pop spirituality and purple prose in connoisseur-only jazz clubs.
The Bitter Pill Social Club takes a look at the lives of the Kochhar family, who find themselves drifting apart in the city of djinns, gins, and fake friends wrapped up in cigarette smoke. As one of their own gears up to tie the knot, three siblings come home to the neurotic parents who raised them. Meanwhile the parents face the family patriarch’s constant judgment. Divorce, disappointment, and disasters ensue as the entitled Kochhar brood dodges old lovers and marriage proposals.
You know exactly who they are. The ones who walk right past club lines, who get what they want before they ask for it. It’s a familiar cast: the centre of attention, the shameless flirt, the loudmouth, the narcissistic writer. You’ve seen them all. You’ve felt their Gucci-anointed aura. Laughing and dancing. Kissing the wrong people at the wrong time. Swaying to their own beat. Going out every night they’re sad. Finding solace in the crowd in a city paved with mildly good intentions and cocaine lines. A city of smooth talkers, armchair activists, and the rich brats of Instagram. A place to talk pop spirituality and purple prose in connoisseur-only jazz clubs.
The Bitter Pill Social Club takes a look at the lives of the Kochhar family, who find themselves drifting apart in the city of djinns, gins, and fake friends wrapped up in cigarette smoke. As one of their own gears up to tie the knot, three siblings come home to the neurotic parents who raised them. Meanwhile the parents face the family patriarch’s constant judgment. Divorce, disappointment, and disasters ensue as the entitled Kochhar brood dodges old lovers and marriage proposals.
Review:
This book can take you on a ride to a rich household where
every life is tangled in the net so badly that it would need a lot of time and
patience to solve the riddle. The book is centered around the life of Sana who
goes through different phases of her life in the need to explore and find
herself; while going through her life we enter the passageway to take a sneak
peek into other people lives too, which are in no way less interesting.
I had a love-hate relationship with the book. I loved the
transparency of the book but I didn’t like a lot of other things.
Talking about the transparency I think the author did a good
job with it. I could taste every flavor of a rich lifestyle. Without taking the
help of lot of brand names and expensive stuff, the author made it possible for
the reader to dive in the right corners to experience the shimmery life of the
characters. This was mainly a family saga where every life is on fire and every
heart is in pain.
If I talk about other things then I found major drawbacks. As
a reader I don’t want the book to put me in slump, this book did just that;
why, well I think it was because of the execution of the story. There was no
timeframe maintained or the sceneries differentiated. We shoot one basket in
London and one in Tokyo. It was a mess at one point and it was crystal clear
the other moment and in between these phases I lost the interest.
The story line was itself not very strong. I loved the idea
of the book but the story was weak, it was bits and pieces of a puzzle but it
never came together to achieve the grand result of completion.
Characters were good but not extraordinary. I couldn’t fall
for anyone; maybe that was the motive of the author; maybe he needed to form
such a chaos where you can’t focus on one person and their life. If that was
his prime agenda then I think he was successful. I couldn’t love anyone but I
liked everyone. Hassan, Asim, Kama, Geetu, Gayatri, I liked them the most. They
had a lot to show us. I didn’t like Sana or Lakshman or Ankit or Surya or
Dhiraj; they were annoying.
All in all, I enjoyed the book and I am sure I lay somewhere
in the middle of liking and not liking this book. But I would recommend this
book to those who needs some inside story of all the happens in the big
mansions. It fits perfectly with the background of Delhi; something I could
relate to.
Eye-Catchers:
· “Do you want some uncle chips?” He beamed at
her, “That’s the best thing anyone’s ever said to me in my life.”
·
“…memories echoing with the faded glamour of old
photographs – some nights he’d open the heaviest photo albums.”
·
“She turned back to face the now cavernous foyer
that in its silence had become the staying place of all her fears.”
You can buy the book here
