Sunday, December 23, 2012

Chinaman - review


‘Wasted Talent’  is a theme that I love. The moon and Six pence is one of my all time favorite of the same genre.
There is another way to view ‘Wasted Talent’, it’s called hidden gem, the gem which will forever be hidden.
We love to tell people our discoveries.
 “Invest in this stock, mark my words. It’s a multi-bagger”
“But no one is saying so”
“That’s why I’m saying this is a multi-bagger, that no one had realized. I found it”
What if the talent that you discovered was never discovered by no one!
Chinaman  - This is one of the first fiction book that I bought.
I wanted to read a sports novel and the only sports that I know reasonably well was cricket and I don’t know much about Srilanka, so I thought that it will be a good experience.
Non-linear narration, a story about the book in the book itself.  Story about a Journalist’s life, about a mystery cricket. LTTE, match – fixing, cricket politics. Is sports more important than life?
So many things are discussed in this book and you need patience, because the main theme is finding the mystery man and you need to patiently go through all the pages to find it out.
There are so many distractions in that book, for example the character Johny, there is no need for him in this book.
You can have a big canvas of picture to provide a good experience, but if you cannot connect everything in it holistically it becomes a drag.  
You know the story is fictional, so many things are looking just out of world, you never will really feel that this is a biography of a mystery cricketer (that’s what I thought initially)
Anyway it’s a different story told pretty well. Taking events from  a person’s life bit by bit and trying to understand him is a difficult effort.
Well done Snehan Karunatilakan