This week we’re taking a closer look at Powell’s Pick of the Month The Dream Builders by Oindrila Mukherjee.
When I first moved to Portland, almost twenty years ago, many a bumper was festooned with a “Keep Portland Weird” sticker and all the municipal letterheads included the motto: “the city that works.” Both were fairly recent adoptions; both were copied from other cities. It seemed to me then that much of the energy of the civic-minded was devoted to concern about the gentrifying Pearl District and how would Gus Van Sant ever make another film set in Portland? It was a time when everyone considered themselves an urban planner and heated debates about the optimal features of bike infrastructure were breaking out with great frequency.
It was a time when everyone considered themselves an urban planner and heated debates about the optimal features of bike infrastructure were breaking out with great frequency.
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If Portlanders were wondering “what makes a city” then, it seemed to me, most were fixated on cosmetic signifiers. Of course, it’s easy to fault that behavior in the abstract, but the question is difficult to consider, let alone use as a guide to work towards a better society.
The question “what makes a city” is ever-present in Oindrila Mukherjee’s
The Dream Builders, but in this marvelous novel, it is both more literally and more deeply considered than I ever managed (I still haven’t decided if I prefer parking-protected bike lanes or not. Listen, they’re not a panacea!).
In
The Dream Builders, Maneka returns to India to visit her father after years of living in the US. Only he’s moved since she left; he now lives in the booming city of Hrishipur. Built up so quickly that it’s practically a new city, Hrishipur is roiling with inequalities and tensions of all kinds. Maneka is the reader’s initial surrogate, but in a stunning display of writerly skill and empathy, Mukherjee follows character after character, from squalor to the tops of gleaming high-rises and back. Central to the book is a shared fixation on an altogether different kind of cosmetic signifier, and the impact it will have on the city. That (literal) development makes this novel even more timely, even more trenchant.
Central to the book is a shared fixation on an altogether different kind of cosmetic signifier, and the impact it will have on the city.
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Portland is a city in transition and the question “what makes our city” has probably never been asked so frequently or so openly.
The Dream Builders can’t answer that question, but it can instill an essential piece of advice for anyone asking it: look wider, look deeper.