niedziela, 10 sierpnia 2008

"Bollywood Nights" by Shobhaa De

I bought it some time ago as a promotional offer – 3 „chick lits” for a very symbolic price. “Bollywood Nights” is the first book which I read from the pile I bought.


At the beginning I thought it will be just very typical easy book, nothing really special. Mather together with a beautiful daughter are coming from Madras to Bombay to fight for the career for the daughter – she should be an actress, a very popular actress. Mother used any opportunity to move forward, without thinking about her daughter at all. And she succeed – through different steps – to make a star out from her daughter “Sweetheart of Millions”.


But the daughter is doing a lot of mistakes – starting relations with wrong guys, finding wrong friends and so on. Finally, she decide to stop with this life and change it to more “usual” one. There are many decisions in between, but finally somehow she is coming back to India and the industry. There are plenty of threads in the book – the relations with parents, sister, husband, small daughter, lovers, work as the actress, role of woman, emotions, India, feeling of being an outsider and more. There are quite some difficult questions asked in the book, on which we need to find answers by ourselves.


There is also an interesting description of the movie industry in India – how it’s working, how the people behave, how are the relations between different people involved in it and so on.


Additional value of this book are the descriptions related to India – to its’ cities, villages, people, culture, food, religion. It was very interesting for me to find all those informations.


One thing which bother me during the reading was usage of plenty of non-English words in the text. I assume it’s Hindi, but as I don’t know it I can’t be sure. And that decreased my understanding of this book.



But besides this one detail I quite liked the book as a whole. For sure it was better than I expected from this kind of books. It’s not bad book ;)

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