Khushwant Singh

In This His First Novel In Ten Years, Khushwant Singh Has Produced An Uninhibited, Erotic And Endlessly Entertaining. Celebration Of Love, Sex And Passion.

The Company of Women

Arihant Verma

I think, between trying to list out fantasies in fiction and gathering all those fantasies around the listlessness that it sometimes carried when the protagonist of the story engaged in bouts of time when he couldn't have sex, made the story a little groggy. I predicted powerful realisations about having indulged in sex in the latter part of the book, but they never came. They just remained spread around in miniature sized sentences mostly in first half of the book. The book had a dull, trivial ending for me.

The first half of the book was going well, I thought, with meaningful head arounds about what was happening. But then, it started getting utterly repetitive. If it was not for the forceful pursuing the fact that the protagonist of the story was absolutely in love with sex, most of the second part of the book could have been omitted.

I couldn't see characters from within somehow. All that was made seen was their outer actions, not their innermost feelings, especially of the protagonist's. I left the book still an acquaintance to the protagonist.

The book leveraged a lot of cliched myths about sex and orgasms. Like, A LOT. Sometimes I could also see snide and sexist remarks hidden in between or the back of the lines, but they were passable because they were portrayed to have originated from the characters. But still they were a little weird to read through.

I gave the book 3 stars for the number of phrases, idioms and words I learnt from reading it, above all.

The Company of Women

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