Liza's review
Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found by Suketu Mehta
I'm having a difficult time finishing this book. I usually read it for a few days and then need a break due to the overwhelming detail and drama that Mehta inserts into his prose. I honestly liked the beginning of the book in which Mehta made me feel as though I could see Bombay: crowding around a street stall for the best food in town, the need to bribe every public official for every little (and big) convenience, the dearth of toilets, the omnipresent din, the rich, the poor, etc. But now I'm stuck on a section where Mehta is fixated upon a beer bar girl. It seems overly "male gaze" to me, especially when the previous section was his expose of the gangwar. He's a drooling, over-eager fourteen-year-old boy--a fourteen year old boy who then goes home to his wife and child and has fancy dinner parties--and I can't help rolling my eyes. I know I'm totally ignorant since I've never been to Bombay, but it's as if someone wrote a book about NYC and just wrote about partying with s...more
