Introduction “Love is not the greatest glue between two people. Sex is.” The book, “The Alchemy of Desire” by Tarun J. Tejpal, starts off at this witty remark which mesmerized me so much as a reader that I could not help but share this phrase and the paragraph following these lines with my friends. Little did I know that the author had established the theme of the book right from the first line, unlike a lot of other books which ramble around the theme all the while, only closing in on it in a few portions of the book and sometimes only towards the end. The book is filled with it; desire. The book is not about its characters. Desire: that is just what the book is about. Through each character in the book, a new aspect of the theme is revealed, creating a mesh of ideas which get sorted out only at the end. Summary Something between the narrator and his wife Fizz (nickname for Fiza) snaps and the narrator no longer feels the same intensity of love for his wife as he had felt earlier.
Travel. Food. Randomness.