When I picked up "The Devotion of Suspect X", I had my expectations low of the crime thriller, despite the 2mn readers' claim on the cover, and despite my general love for International literature from Japan, inspired from Haruki Murakami's stables. Having read it twice over now, I stand corrected, and yet I realize I probably started from the best entry point in this novel which has subtlety and subtext all over itself, my favorite kind of story-telling.
The book is a reasonably well-paced crime novel that keeps you hooked till the end, even though you know the whodunnit (as well as whydunnit and howdunnit) in the first 50 pages of the story. Despite that, the twist is something you'd never ever guess and the subtlety of hints makes you want to smile when it is revealed towards the end. The plot is beautifully crafted with the protagonists being a couple of geniuses, a hapless mother-daughter and a key question "Is it more difficult to devise an unsolvable problem or to solve one?" There's generous amount of maths, science, philosophy and logic colluding all over this fine piece of literature, but they all fit beautifully and never overwhelm a reader who might in normal circumstances shy away from those subjects.
Come to think of it, in fact, the only thing that seems out of place in hindsight is the title of the book, whose impact I think has been lost entirely in translation.
Yeah, I would have probably just called this book "Devotion". Because that is the only word for Ishigami's terrifying simplicity of action, because that is the only word that describes the enormity of what hits Yasuko in the end, and because I am sure that is what the author would have been drenched in to produce a book like this.
The characters are wonderfully, realistically drawn and yet kept semi-closed in a way that forces you to imagine what the protagonists must be going through and question their actions (or lack thereof) rather than doling it out on to the reader on a platter to just gobble. My heart goes out to Ishigami, the simple genius mathematician, for whom you never once stop feeling "wronged" as a reader, from beginning to end, to the extent that you feel a vague anger for pretty much every other character in the book. In my opinion, pulling off that kind of subtle empathy in a book is kudos to the author, and will remain the most lasting memory in my mind.
The book is a reasonably well-paced crime novel that keeps you hooked till the end, even though you know the whodunnit (as well as whydunnit and howdunnit) in the first 50 pages of the story. Despite that, the twist is something you'd never ever guess and the subtlety of hints makes you want to smile when it is revealed towards the end. The plot is beautifully crafted with the protagonists being a couple of geniuses, a hapless mother-daughter and a key question "Is it more difficult to devise an unsolvable problem or to solve one?" There's generous amount of maths, science, philosophy and logic colluding all over this fine piece of literature, but they all fit beautifully and never overwhelm a reader who might in normal circumstances shy away from those subjects.
Come to think of it, in fact, the only thing that seems out of place in hindsight is the title of the book, whose impact I think has been lost entirely in translation.
Yeah, I would have probably just called this book "Devotion". Because that is the only word for Ishigami's terrifying simplicity of action, because that is the only word that describes the enormity of what hits Yasuko in the end, and because I am sure that is what the author would have been drenched in to produce a book like this.
The characters are wonderfully, realistically drawn and yet kept semi-closed in a way that forces you to imagine what the protagonists must be going through and question their actions (or lack thereof) rather than doling it out on to the reader on a platter to just gobble. My heart goes out to Ishigami, the simple genius mathematician, for whom you never once stop feeling "wronged" as a reader, from beginning to end, to the extent that you feel a vague anger for pretty much every other character in the book. In my opinion, pulling off that kind of subtle empathy in a book is kudos to the author, and will remain the most lasting memory in my mind.
Go read! Available here on Flipkart.
