Ib's Endless Search for Satisfaction

"This is a debut novel—in fact, we had quite a lot of debut novels on the list this year, which is exciting. Roshan is a young writer. He’s in his early thirties, somebody who has been dreaming of doing this for a long time, but it’s taken him many years to get around to this point. The novel is set in Bangalore, which is where Roshan is from, and it’s about the kinds of things that many young, middle-class people in Indian cities contend with: a slightly orphaned feeling, a feeling that they’re not well-understood by their parents or others of the previous generation, and who are looking for some kind of new way to think about the meaning of life. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . The titular Ib is a young man with dysfunctional parents. His father is mentally ill; his mother doesn’t really have a lot of influence over things. So he retreats more and more into his head, and his life takes some strange routes to exploration, eventually following a kind of hermit up into the Himalayas. What’s compelling about this book, I think, is his portrait of contemporary urban Indian youth. As you know, India is a young country. It’s dominated by its youth, and Bangalore is probably the most youth-dominated city of all. It’s the city of the tech industry, where a lot of people roll up from other places to work in those kinds of jobs, and so it has a lot of people like Roshan, middle-class young people looking to make a life in the city, and often being disappointed by the promises of contemporary India. Well, Roshan is very interested in the big experiments in language that are out there. He workshopped the book by reading texts like Ulysses , and his conception of the novel changed each time he discovered a writer who offered him a new conception of language. I was at dinner with him the other night, and he was telling me about his love for Saul Bellow and we were bonding over the fact that reading The Adventures of Augie March was a definitive moment in both of our reading lives. That book helped him to imagine how he might find a language for what he was doing, and it has something to do with his very jagged, strange, expressive sentences."