A Case of Exploding Mangoes

De: Mohammed Hanif

Narrado por: Paul Bhattacharjee

There is a saying that when lovers fall out, a plane goes down.

A Case of Exploding Mangoes is the story of one such plane. Why did a Hercules C130, the world's sturdiest aircraft, carrying Pakistan's military dictator General Zia ul Haq, go down on 17 August, 1988?

Was it because of: mechanical failure; human error; the CIA's impatience; a blind woman's curse; generals not happy with their pension plans; the mango season? Or could it be your narrator, Ali Shigri?

Teasing, provocative, and very funny, Mohammed Hanif's debut novel takes one of the subcontinent's enduring mysteries and out if it spins a tale as rich and colourful as a beggar's dream.

©2008 Mohammed Hanif (P)2008 W F Howes Ltd

Reseñas de la Crítica

"Reader Paul Bhattacharjee gives voice to torture chambers, social satire, bucolic lyricisim 'night on the mountains is a black sheet flung from the skies' and Catch-22-style military slapstick with equal panache, through I suspect the real Zia was a little less cuddly than he makes him out to be." (Saturday)
"This explanatory novel, woven in language as explosive as the mangoes themselves, is wickedly cynical and reveals layers of outrageous - and pausible - corruption." (The Observer)

An absolute pleasurable presentation of facts wrapped in humour

The narrator gave life to the characters with as pert performance of accents, tone, language, idiosyncrasies of character and personalities.
The author was very good at the military terminology and representation of the characters to their real life personalities. I say this because many of these were known to my parent's personally and I lived in Pakistan at the time.
Some of the sexual details of two characters, I found to be in bad taste.

Time Capsule

I was a kid growing up in India when Pakistan's president Zia Ul Haq was killed in an airplane crash, and the event was a huge news item of the time. I still have the echoes of that news somewhere in my back pocket. Finding this book was brilliant on that front but I noted that even if I was not aware of the whole incident I'd had enjoyed the book equally because the book is written with excellent pace and great character development.

The narration gives soul to the book and makes is unputdownable. An excellent little piece of work.

Starts well but then drones on and on

Is there anything you would change about this book?

The last few chapters are unnecessary and seem to indicate the author's inability to end the story.

Any additional comments?

Hilarious otherwise. Its rare to come across a book that makes you laugh.

A work of fiction far from reality

A comic novel which is far from reality. The writer doesn’t mention that most of his characters are fictitious and are a figment of imagination. A common reader therefore, thinks of it as a true tale of the circumstances which killed General Zia. The writing shows clear agenda of the writer which is to present negativities of pakistan army and he has quoted things which again are fictitious. Overall a waste of time as the novel has zero relevance to its tittle that is who killed general zia.

A case of exploding mangoes

Overall terrible. The book was slow from the beginning and it took a while to get to the action. There are too many characters and you have no idea what’s going on.