This quote-portal warns us of this, taken from the Mahabharata, the monumental epic poetry in Sanskrit that -saving the distances- acts as a mirror text of The Age of Vice by serving it as the context of fierce confrontation for power and the drama of the young generations forced to perpetuate the sins of their ruthless parents: “And as a result of their short lives they will hardly acquire knowledge. And, due to the meagerness of their knowledge, they will lack wisdom. And because of that, greed and greed will overwhelm them all.”
Overwhelming the reader is what the second novel by journalist Deepti Kapoor (Uttar Pradesh, 1981) achieves, after raising two previous storms in the form of fierce disputes over her translation rights and audiovisual rights, but for the battle the person in charge had to fight with herself to put together six hundred pages that are a power line from beginning to end, a hostage generator, a factory of insomniacs.
At this point, few grounds are as worn as that of the laudatory vocabulary of the crime thriller (electrifying! Tachycardic!) but what Kapoor achieves is resurfacing it, filling it with meaning again. And few more lazy exercises than spinning a string of influences or connections, but the invitation to combine Shakespeare, The Godfather, Game of Thrones, Succession, Bollywood and Vikram Chandra in the same sentence is too tempting to pass up.
The Age of Vice makes good the idea that crime is a very useful prism to understand the deep structures of both a society and a family.
On the first thing: the Wadia and the Singh are two clans that get rich above all by driving the poor out of their homes to speculate on the land, subduing anyone who dares interfere with their plans with money, intimidation and violence.
Regarding the second: to the permanent vigilance of your ally so that he does not stab you in the back is added the need for your descendants to comply with the ruthless rigors that uphold the system, but Sunny Wadia, the heir of one of the parties He prefers drugs, women and parties. Will the evil empire resist excessive ambition, the inevitable conspiracies between its different factions and the weakness of some of its key components?
Kappor manages to leave us breathless with the description of an atrocious generic framework -the null value of the life of the pariah, the cyclical outbreaks of violence, the wild hedonism...- that moves us with the intimate portrait of some victims in the eye of the hurricane - Sunny himself, his lover, the journalist Neda, and his servant, Ajay.
A very intelligent use of the structure, with jumps forward and back in time that sometimes return to the same moment from different perspectives, and a great mastery of tension punctuate a cosmopolitan macro-narrative (New Delhi, Maharajganj, Rajasthan, London...) and multi-spherical (gangster ivy, political corruption, journalistic investigation, prison hell…) in which the most extreme formulations of hate and love, vileness and sacrifice are agitated, like particles in an accelerator. Cut your nails before you start it.
Deepti Kapoor
The Age of Vice
Translators Ana Alcaína and Laura Martín
Alfaguara 608 pages 23.90 euros
