The blue bedspread is definitely the death of the written word and no amount of window dressing and networking can change that. The story --- there is really none --- is contrived, the situations trumped up, the characters nameless zombies. This is the real Y2k bug of a book! I was so grossly disappointed and bored by the book that I made it a point to read every word of it just to figure out what the critics saw in it. Well, either the few reviewers are the Tom Hanks, for believe me this entire effort is amateurish and bad. Maybe the subcontinet has produced good authors like , Salman Rushdie, Vikram Seth and Amitav Ghosh. Jha certainly is not even a fraction as talented. However if you want to make sense of nonsense, you could try your patience here. For me this required two aspirins to get over....

Having read "The God of Small Things", "A Fine Balance", and "Interpreter of Maladies", I felt the urge to continue on the road to better understanding the genre of Indian authors. This small novel is both disturbing and sad, but is also written in a beautiful manner - almost compelling the reader to continue even though the air of pending shock hovers between the lines.

One evening, a middle-aged man gets a phone call from a hospital saying that his sister has dies in childbirth, the child had been arranged for adoption but the adoptive family cannot take the child (a baby girl) until the following day. The man agrees to take the child for the night and during the course of the night (sleepless for the man) he proceeds to write non-stop to the child, weaving the stories of the family from whom she comes. As she sleeps and occasionally wakes and cries - lying on a blue bedspread, the stories he scribbles out furiously fall into patterns by person: mother, father, sister, and brother. And they are not particularly lovely tales - in fact, they are full of the painful things that families sometimes do to one another under the guise of "love".

It can be tiring, sometimes, to read book after book in which families and supposed loved ones abuse others, usually the women, of the household. Although I realize that this is the way of the world - there is a certain exhaustion that comes from reading book in which you spend emotional time wishing that people wouldn't be so damn mean to other people - including their own children. Unlike some other reviewers, I did not find much redemption in the characters, only pain, and a good deal of sadness.

true - this book is not for everyone. the content clearly is shocking, outrageous and depressing, yet somehow quaintly uplifting - atleast i found it to be so.

i have to admit that i have been a huge fan of raj kamal jha from my school days when i used to eagerly await his sunday column that would appear every second week. i would get up gleefully every sunday morning looking forward to jha's beuatifully written columns. while clearly the blue bedspread does not have the same kind of vivid magic about them, the stunning control over a twisted narrative speaks volumes for his talent.

the blue bedspread is a touching tale about how sometimes the unthinkable happens to be the solution and the solution is clearly unspeakable. as enormously satisfying as the solution can be, it brings about dark tidings, the guilt associated with which is purged by the recounting of the blue bedspread tales to the day old baby by our protagonist, whose name does not matter in a city of twelve million, whose looks does not matter except that the stomach droops over the belt of his trousers.

depressing, disgusting and yet delightful. raj kamal jha is a true magician with words and images.