Upamanyu Chatterjee’s latest book is a tale of brothers separated at birth, and his spin on the overused plot point. Anyone familiar with Chatterjee’s work would agree that his books are not the sort of easy-read varieties made for journeys, but they require the readers to spend a lot of time thinking about the words they read, as much as he spent writing them. Fairy Tales at Fifty is no different, but it is ultimately less rewarding than any of his other works, partly due to the choice of his protagonist, but mostly due to the lack of exploring the plot to its potential. 

Nirip, on the verge of his fiftieth birthday, realizes that his parents are not his actual biological ones, and he ponders on the alternative life he could have had. Anguli, or Jhabua, the separated twin leads a vagrant life wandering across cities, killing people for fun and games. They meet at the start of the book and open up to each other, mostly coz no one else was interested in them. The first 43 pages, where Anguli narrates his tale, are a breeze, aided by Chatterjee’s macabre wit and detailed observation of the grotesque, which also lets the anticipation grow higher going ahead. 

When it comes to Nirip’s turn the tale loses its steam, and instead indulges in intensely labored rumination of his life and the things he has surrounded himself with. The best parts of Nirip’s tale are the curious family ties that he unravels, and how much of them he misunderstood over his fifty years. In fact, the family tree of Pashupati (the patriarch) is one of the most intriguing and weird ones I have come across.  

There are important plot points in his tale like the staging of his own kidnap to get back at his father, the violent cricket match where the players get killed according to the whims of its organizers, his father’s blood and flesh trade, and his relationship with his half-male, half-female sister Magnum (getting the rawest deal of them all), but they are discarded as quickly as they are brought into the story. Once Nirip gets kidnapped, the narration gets even more tedious detailing of the surroundings he finds himself in and the quirks of the men who kidnap him. It doesn’t help that every one of his kidnappers is called Scruffy with different second names, making it difficult to identify them or tell them for the other. 

The underlying philosophy seems to be, also spelt out in the book, as we grow old, we become ourselves and life becomes as pointless as it has always been, but we chose to grind it out, since death seems a worse alternative. The nothingness and tedium of old age has been explored earlier by the author in his previous books on Shyamanand and Barfi (The Last Burden and Way to Go), and he does not add much to it, thankfully, since this is supposed to be a fairy tale. The scatological observations are also toned down, but Chatterjee’s prose is as impeccable as ever, commas and hyphens intact. 

I was waiting for a new book by him ever since I read Way to Go, yet I came across this book only by accident, and was surprised not to find any publicity about its release. I’m glad I read it and will keep it in my collection for a future re-read, once I think I’m equipped enough to handle his works, but I don’t think I would recommend this book to many.