This book starts its journey with BookCrossing from Delphi, Greece
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" Winner of the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize 2010.


‘Solo’ recounts the life and daydreams of a reclusive one-hundred-year-old man from Bulgaria.

Before the man lost his sight, he read this story in a magazine: a group of explorers came upon a community of parrots speaking the language of a society that had been wiped out in a recent catastrophe. Astonished by their discovery, they put the parrots in cages and sent them home so that linguists could record what remained of the lost language. But the parrots, already traumatised by the devastation they had recently witnessed, died on the way.

Wondering if, unlike the hapless parrots, he has any wisdom to leave to the world, Ulrich embarks on an epic armchair journey through a century of violent politics, forbidden music, lost love and failed chemistry, finding his way eventually to an astonishing epiphany of tenderness and enlightenment. "



~~~~~~To the person who found this book:~~~~~~

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This book is now yours, and you can keep it if you choose, although I would love you to read and then share it. You can pass it on someone you know or release it once again in the wild, leaving it on a park bench, a phone booth, a hostel lobby...wherever you think it's suitable for the book to continue it's journey. If you pass it along, please make a release note to let others know where you left it.

I hope you enjoy the book!

A British-Indian author writting a novel starring an 100 years old Bulgarian man. Sounds intriguing, right?
Unfortunatelly Solo didn't meet my expectations.

The first half of the book describes the every day life and the memories of said Bulgarian old man, who is rather dull or even irking some times. Of course one can feel some sympathy when he faces some difficulties, but in general I couldn't connect with his story. The other characters featured here didn't feel original or interesting either. On my opinion the author didn't manage to create lots of ambiance or communicate the feeling of the era and the political/social changes at the time. Lots of telling, little showing. Albeit its unbelievable, dull characters and its averrage writting, this first part of the novel was OK-ish.

On the second half of the book, Rana Dasgupta suddenly decides to move on a completely different story, pretending its some kind of day-dream of the main character. I guess in the first half we are supposed to follow Bulgaria's history from the 1900s till the late 1990s and on the second half we are supposed to follow the history from 2000 of... Of what? From Bulgaria the plot moves to a completely different direction, to Georgia and latter to USA, featuring completely irrelevant and cliche characters. The author puts some elements of the first half into the second half, trying to establish a connection, while at some point the 100 years old Bulgarian man re-appears inside what was supposed to be his day dream out of nowhere and the end of the book is dull.

I think that Rana Dasgupta didn't manage to understand or capture the soul and mentallity of Balkan and East Europe's people and he can't stop producing cliche after cliche, but that wasn't my only problem with the book. My problem was that he chose a weird format (some short of meta-fiction that is? Naming chapters after chemical elements and animals or saying two different stories supposedly as one?) And that he didn't manage to communicate to the reader whatever he was trying to say, that the prose in most of the book was so and so and that the novel felt fragmental without coherence.
This wasn't the worst book I've read, but I think it's rather indifferent and I'll soon forget all about it.

Solo is now travelling to meet the winner of the 2020 INTL Annual Clearence Sweepstakes! I hope you'll enjoy this book more than me, different strokes for different folks after all : )

Good Luck little book and Don't Forget to write your news from time to time!

Received as part of the annual clearance sweepstake.
Thank you!