Skip to main content

The Bestseller She Wrote


Book Review

Title: The Bestseller She Wrote
Author: Ravi Subramanian
Publisher: Westland Ltd, 2015
Pages: 391
Price: Rs 295


Paraphrasing Francis Bacon, one may say that some books are potboilers, a few are the fire beneath the pot, and still few are the food inside the pot.  Ravi Subramanian’s latest novel, The Bestseller She Wrote, belongs to the first category.  It has all the ingredients of a successful Indian potboiler.  There is the hero who is a successful executive in a leading bank and also a famous writer, a heroine who is the quintessential Indian wife with all the virtues and no vices, and a villain who is ambitious, scheming, manipulative and above all a ravishing beauty who is happy to shed her clothes as required by the author (or the director of the movie). 

The main plot revolves round a modern version of the ancient triangular love.  Aditya Kapoor is a happily married, successful banker and “a rock star author.”  Maya, his wife, is a paragon of virtues, a teacher at Dhirubhai Ambani International School, who also involves herself in the social initiatives of the school among the urban poor in Mumbai, particularly the slums of Dharavi.  A young graduate from IIM Bengaluru, Shreya, storms like a virus into the idyllic life of the Kapoors and churns the ocean of their married life with as much drama and skin show as required for a roaring Bollywood movie.  And the churning will also yield the amrit in the form of a moral lesson preached by none other than the hero.

Shreya is a ruthless egotist, a typical contemporary villain.  For her, everything and everybody is a means that can be manipulated to achieve success and fame.  “Everything is commerce,” as Aditya says in the novel, for people like Shreya.  “Others be damned.  Sense an opportunity, go for the kill.”

If Shreya enters like a virus into the Kapoor paradise, Ebola enters as the tear-jerker without which a movie in India can be a box office disaster.  “Soon to be a motion picture,” declares the cover of the novel.  When Shreya’s “bestseller” is released, Anurag Kashyap (yes, the real one) is the guest of honour and the movie rights are bought by him in a grand public gesture.   Promising to become a movie is one of the essential ingredients of a bestseller.

What are the other ingredients?  The journey must be tragic but the ending happy, dictates Aditya Kapoor.  If the writer is glamorous and sexy, the book will sell more.  “You will be the darling of the media.  A pretty author gets away with a lot.”  A few pages later we are told, “If an author is an MBA, or well qualified, foreign educated, young, well-networked, he or she finds many backers.  This is because the publishers know that they will be able to sell a significant number of copies in the author’s own personal network.”  Finally, “Sometimes the best-written books fail and the miserable ones do well.  It’s also a matter of luck.”

Ravi Subramanian knows what makes a publishing success and he uses that knowledge effectively.  Towards the end of the novel, a character says about whatever has been happening, “This is turning out to be a potboiler.”  That’s just what the novel is.  For those who want a quickie, The Bestseller She Wrote is a good choice.  Apart from the fairly fast-paced plot and suspense, skin show and panty-groping, there is a lovely moral lecture welded with an apology from Aditya Kapoor crowning the climax of the novel.  I can imagine the thunderous applause with which the Bollywood audience will receive that lecture coming from a tinsel Kapoor. 

“The Bestseller She Wrote is a combustible cocktail of love, betrayal and redemption,” declares the blurb.  Indeed it is that.  A cocktail.  Once the intoxication is over there will be little to carry home.  Not a single character that sinks into your psyche.  Not a single line that bubbles in your memory.  But bestsellers are not meant to do those things. 



I am reviewing ‘The Bestseller She Wrote’ by Ravi Subramanian as a part of the biggest Book Review Program forIndian Bloggers. Participate now to get free books!


Links to prominent sellers:

Amazon India
Flipkart


Indian Bloggers

Labels:

Comments

  1. Kishor KDecember 23, 2015 at 8:57 AM

    I must read this book. Thanks for the review.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Purba chakrabortyDecember 24, 2015 at 1:25 AM

    A wonderful review :)

    ReplyDelete
  3. Arpita DashDecember 24, 2015 at 10:33 AM

    A wonderful review... I have also read it and quite liked it too...

    ReplyDelete
  4. Tomichan MatheikalDecember 24, 2015 at 12:52 PM

    Dhanyavad, Rajneesh.

    ReplyDelete
  5. UnknownJanuary 27, 2016 at 8:05 AM

    How real and hard-hitting are the emotions,sir? I want to read something about loss of morality,sexual affairs,betrayal,jealousy etc involving Indian society but written in such a way that it disturbs me and keeps me awake in the night. If not this,can you suggest me something else?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalJanuary 28, 2016 at 6:20 AM

      Right now I'm reading K R Meera's 'Hangwoman.' A good novel, set in Calcutta, a fascinating blend of history, mythology and legends. I recommend it strongly.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Ghost of a Banyan Tree

  Image from here Fiction Jaichander Varma could not sleep. It was past midnight and the world outside Jaichander Varma’s room was fairly quiet because he lived sufficiently far away from the city. Though that entailed a tedious journey to his work and back, Mr Varma was happy with his residence because it afforded him the luxury of peaceful and pure air. The city is good, no doubt. Especially after Mr Modi became the Prime Minister, the city was the best place with so much vikas. ‘Where’s vikas?’ Someone asked Mr Varma once. Mr Varma was offended. ‘You’re a bloody antinational mussalman who should be living in Pakistan ya kabristan,’ Mr Varma told him bluntly. Mr Varma was a proud Indian which means he was a Hindu Brahmin. He believed that all others – that is, non-Brahmins – should go to their respective countries of belonging. All Muslims should go to Pakistan and Christians to Rome (or is it Italy? Whatever. Get out of Bharat Mata, that’s all.) The lower caste Hindus co...
121 comments
Read more

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl
44 comments
Read more

Tanishq and the Patriots

Patriots are a queer lot. You don’t know what all things can make them pick up the gun. Only one thing is certain apparently: the gun for anything. When the neighbouring country behaves like a hoard of bandicoots digging into our national borders, we will naturally take up the gun. But nowadays we choose to redraw certain lines on the map and then proclaim that not an inch of land has been lost. On the other hand, when a jewellery company brings out an ad promoting harmony between the majority and the minority populations, our patriots take up the gun. And shoot down the ad. Those who promote communal harmony are traitors in India today. The sacred duty of the genuine Indian patriot is to hate certain communities, rape their women, plunder their land, deny them education and other fundamental rights and basic requirements. Tanishq withdrew the ad that sought to promote communal harmony. The patriot’s gun won. Aapka Bharat Mahan. In the novel Black Hole which I’m writing there is...
61 comments
Read more

Romance in Utopia

Book Review Title: My Haven Author: Ruchi Chandra Verma Pages: 161 T his little novel is a surfeit of sugar and honey. All the characters that matter are young employees of an IT firm in Bengaluru. One of them, Pihu, 23 years and all too sweet and soft, falls in love with her senior colleague, Aditya. The love is sweetly reciprocated too. The colleagues are all happy, furthermore. No jealousy, no rivalry, nothing that disturbs the utopian equilibrium that the author has created in the novel. What would love be like in a utopia? First of all, there would be no fear or insecurity. No fear of betrayal, jealousy, heartbreak… Emotional security is an essential part of any utopia. There would be complete trust between partners, without the need for games or power struggles. Every relationship would be built on deep understanding, where partners complement each other perfectly. Miscommunication and misunderstanding would be rare or non-existent, as people would have heightened emo...
9 comments
Read more

A Lesson from Little Prince

I joined the #WriteAPageADay challenge of Blogchatter , as I mentioned earlier in another post. I haven’t succeeded in writing a page every day, though. But as long as you manage to write a minimum of 10,000 words in the month of Feb, Blogchatter is contented. I woke up this morning feeling rather vacant in the head, which happens sometimes. Whenever that happens to me but I do want to get on with what I should, I fall back on a book that has inspired me. One such book is Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s The Little Prince . I have wished time and again to meet Little Prince in person as the narrator of his story did. We might have interesting conversations like the ones that exist in the novel. If a sheep eats shrubs, will he also eat flowers? That is one of the questions raised by Little Prince [LP]. “A sheep eats whatever he meets,” the narrator answers. “Even flowers that have thorns?” LP is interested in the rose he has on his tiny planet. When he is told that the sheep will eat f...
8 comments
Read more