Tokyo Cancelled

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

A major international debut novel from a storyteller who couples a timelessly beguiling style with an energetically modern worldscape.

Thirteen passengers are stranded at an airport. Tokyo, their destination, is covered in snow and all flights are cancelled. To pass the night they form a huddle by the silent baggage carousels and tell each other stories.

Robert De Niro's lovechild explores the magical properties of a packet of Oreos; a Ukrainian merchant is led by a wingless bird back to a lost lover; a man who edits other people's memories has to confront his own past; a Chinese youth with amazing luck cuts men's hair and cleans their ears; an entrepreneur risks losing everything in his obsession with a doll; a mute Turkish girl is left all alone in the house of a German cartographer.

Told by people on a journey, these are stories about lives in transit. Stories from the great cities - New York, Istanbul, Delhi, Lagos, Paris, Buenos Aires - that grow into a novel about the hopes and dreams and disappointments that connect people everywhere.

Dasgupta's writing is utterly distinctive and fresh, so striking that it seems to come from the future and the past all at once, but in marrying a timeless mystery to an alert modernity, his cautionary tales manage to be reminiscent of both Ballard and Borges, depicting ordinary extraordinary individuals (some lost, some confused, some happy) in a world that remains ineffable, inexplicable, wonderful.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

In this "global citizen narrative" (the Wall Street Journal Asia), a veritable Canterbury Tales worth of passengers swap stories when their flight to Tokyo is cancelled. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Publishers Weekly Review

Dasgupta spins a self-consciously modern tapestry of freewheeling fantasies and subverted fairy tales with his ambitious first book. When a severe blizzard in Tokyo diverts a 747 to a remote airport, the stranded passengers gather around the baggage carousel to trade the sort of stories that strangers don't typically swap, unless one's fellow travelers are Beckett and Borges. Refracting the contemporary world's metropolises through a dystopian once-upon-a-time sensibility, Dasgupta tackles themes of transit, dislocation and uprootedness. His critique of consumerism and the global economy can be humorous: in "The Store on Madison Avenue," Robert de Niro's half-Chinese illegitimate son, Pavel, unites with Martin Scorsese and Isabella Rossellini's love child, who eats a magic box of Oreo cookies that transforms her into an upscale New York boutique. Dasgupta takes a more didactic tone in "The Memory Editor," about the prodigal son of an investment banker who goes to work for a corporate enterprise called "MyPast," which gathers and markets ejected memories when a London of the near future literally loses its sense of history. Other tales discover poignant moments of connection, as when a wingless bird hobbles across Europe to reunite two lost lovers. Though Dasgupta's postmodern stories can be too pat, his sprawling, experimental project achieves an exotic luster. Agent, Jennifer Joel. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Booklist Review

In the spirit of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, Dasgupta's first novel assembles fanciful tales--a baker's dozen of them--told by a random assortment of travelers. In the midst of a blinding snowstorm that shuts down Tokyo's main airport, 13 stranded tourists pass the hours by spinning stories that reflect their diverse and colorful backgrounds. A rural tailor is commissioned by a prince to create a unique silk robe, but his life collapses in ruins when ignorant guards refuse to let him deliver the goods. The disowned son of a wealthy banker lands a job cataloging memories for an increasingly amnesiac population of modern-day London, only to discover his father among the company's customers. In perhaps the most outlandish and risque tale, Robert DeNiro's illegitimate son stumbles on the secret of transforming matter via a magical box of Oreo cookies. Dasgupta's themes run the gamut from loss and betrayal to uprootedness and alienation in a magical realist manner that echoes the best of Garcia Marquez and makes for irresistibly absorbing entertainment. --Carl Hays Copyright 2005 Booklist

Kirkus Book Review

Thirteen travelers stranded in an Asian airport spin 13 fantastical tales to while away the long night. In what is billed as a first novel but which readers are more likely to see as so many loosely knit stories, a snowstorm in Tokyo forces an international flight to put down at an airport somewhere in Asian flyover country. All but 13 of the passengers find lodging in a nearby city where a summit meeting has attracted armies of reporters and protesters, leaving bookings unusually tight. When the airport employees abandon the unbooked to spend a sleepless night in waiting-room chairs, the travelers huddle together and agree to the proposal of a Japanese salaryman to amuse each other with stories. By stupendous coincidence, everyone in the group has at the ready a slightly fabulous yarn for the telling. Such unity as there is to these tales comes from the multinational Dasgupta's ability to insert in most of the fables some form of magic suitable for a 21st century already full of wireless conveniences and stupendous TV screens. In the first, a provincial tailor is unlucky enough to be landed with a visit from a carload of dissolute Saudi-ish aristocrats, whose princely leader admires the tailor's work enough to order up an outfit so luxurious that it bankrupts its maker and turns out to be undeliverable. In one of the longer tales, an Indian techno-zillionaire with the rupees to buy fertility for his sterile Bollywood-star wife becomes the father of twins whom he separates at birth when he finds the male twin too physically grotesque to keep. The beautiful female twin, fecund in the extreme, unites under profoundly weird circumstances with her brother after he has become a bizarre TV star. In another story of child abandonment, an unwanted baby becomes a seamstress whose beautifully stitched bedcovers have miraculous powers, goes to work and falls disastrously in love in an S&M bordello in Warsaw. And, finally, a Bangladeshi seaman coughs up a bird that walks across Europe to find the seaman's ladylove. Pleasantly weird, but not electrifying. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.