Dubi reviewed No land's man by Aasif Mandvi
Review of "No land's man" on 'Goodreads'
4 stars
I expected this book to be a lot funnier, and yet I wasn't disappointed with it at all. Mandvi is a good storyteller, and there is humour in his book, but it's not laugh out loud funny, and it wasn't meant to be (near the end there's a sort of explanation for why this is so, indirectly). Actually, my biggest laugh came from the Acknowledgements...
No Land's Man is a sort of introspective autobiography, focused, as the title suggests, on Mandvi's ever-present feeling of otherness, of being a misfit no matter where he goes. That the story ends, as we know, with a sort of catharsis in his success as the Daily Show's correspondent, doesn't really change that.
The book has a more or less chronological order, but Mandvi freely diverts from it, going back and forth in time, to tell a story that is more than just the progression …
I expected this book to be a lot funnier, and yet I wasn't disappointed with it at all. Mandvi is a good storyteller, and there is humour in his book, but it's not laugh out loud funny, and it wasn't meant to be (near the end there's a sort of explanation for why this is so, indirectly). Actually, my biggest laugh came from the Acknowledgements...
No Land's Man is a sort of introspective autobiography, focused, as the title suggests, on Mandvi's ever-present feeling of otherness, of being a misfit no matter where he goes. That the story ends, as we know, with a sort of catharsis in his success as the Daily Show's correspondent, doesn't really change that.
The book has a more or less chronological order, but Mandvi freely diverts from it, going back and forth in time, to tell a story that is more than just the progression of one person's life. As he himself realizes at the end of the book - this is about more than him as an individual. He has come to symbolize something to many people, and in a sense, this book is less the story of Aasif Mandviwala, and more the story of that symbol.
