Animal's People: The Last Book You Must Read Before You Die?📚📖

Animal's People by Indra Sinha

I just finished reading the 1001st book in my '1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die', a fictional novel called 'Animal's People', written by Indra Sinha, and not because I've managed to make it all the way through the 1001 books in that book, but because I had the bright idea to start reading books from the other end of the book and work my way back to where I am now in the timeline of books to be read in chronological order (which is around the 1890s).

Animal's People by Indra Sinha

'Animal's People' is one of those books you either love or hate, or don't know if you hate it or like it, like me:-)

It's a book I'm glad I just lent from my local library and didn't fork out any money to read, as I think I would have felt ripped off buying such a Freudian nightmare of a book.

The main protagonist named Animal is a sex obsessed gutter-mouthed invalid street person who tells the story through a series of audio cassette tapes a journalist pays him to narrate for him to turn into a book.

And just having read Trent Dalton's new book 'Lola in the Mirror' the parallels in storytelling of the two fictional street people books are not lost on me -

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"Animal's People, set in the fictional Indian city of Khaufpur, was a reworking of the Bhopal disaster, based on Sinha's long association working with the Bhopal survivors."

"Sinha's narrator is a 19-year-old orphan of Khaufpur, born a few days before the 1984 Bhopal disaster, whose spine has become so twisted that he must walk on all fours. Ever since he can remember, he has gone on all fours. Known to everyone simply as Animal, he rejects sympathy, spouts profanity and obsesses about sex. He lives with a crazy old French nun called Ma Franci, and his dog Jara. Also, he falls in love with a local musician's daughter, Nisha.
The story was recorded in Hindi on a series of tapes by [the fictional] Animal himself and it has been translated to English as well. The author uses Animal's odd mixture of Hindi, French and Indianised English such as "kampani" (company), "jarnalis" (journalist) and "jamisponding" (spying, like James Bond)."

I see that Mohsin Hamid the author of another one of the 1001 books referenced in my book has a blurb on the back of 'Animal's People' dust jacket praising the book.

'The Reluctant Fundamentalist' is a book I won't be reading anytime soon ... or ever ... as I saw the movie made of it years ago and that was enough for me -

The Reluctant Fundamentalist

Having finished reading 'Animal's People' yesterday on the last day of October I thought this passage above from the book was amusing, considering the two cartoons on my calendar for the months of October and November;-)

Heather O'Rourke
(December 27, 1975 – February 1, 1988)

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