´Sayonara, church´, Craig says, waving his hand and bidding farewell to millenia of organised religion.
I´ve spent a couple of good years working with and for various start-ups. Some of them were funny to deal with, some were completely outerwordly, in the very bad sense of the word, some were just plainly trying to sell something, while using a language some thought it´s how the future is talking.
The Startup Wife by Tahmima Anam, with its Utopia teach-incubator and the bubbling brainstorming of ideas that should sound as irrealistic as possible in order to receive impressive, over 6-digit dollars support made me feel like the fish in the water. Yeah, I can see the grotesque, the human and the utopian endeavours of most of the startups I´ve and will have to deal with. It´s really fun the startup life. But Asha, a nerd with the six first digits of pi tattooed who gave up her academic dreams to become a startup wife, it´s a little bit more than all the other start-up people. She married Cyrus, whom she admired in her first school years, and created the code for putting his dream into motion: an app who can match personal preferences to create tailored rituals. Like you put in a magic hat a couple of ingredients and you can have a thematic birthday for your cat or a Hindu-themed bat mitzva. Gd is dead, long live the app!
I would have love to see the story developed around the app, its users and the entire social interactions, but instead, the book delves into the startup culture, its excentricities at the borderline of mental (in)sanity, the sexism and the position of women. All are important topics but not at all original. In the end, it is a matter of how those topics are approached but the story goes further by rearranging in different settings stories that I´ve heard and read about more than once. Asha has the potential of an outstanding character but her pride - as a woman, code-creator and start-up character, other than wife - manifests as an echo of other people´s reactions and expectations.
After a couple of many many pages when felt like about to sleep, the ending, taking place in our current Covid times, has some good twists, but somehow it is too late for properly saving the rest of the story. The dialogue between characters sounds more than once a bit artificious, with references out of context because they do not suit the way in which the characters were projected originally.
I deeply wished that I like more The Startup Wife, but despite all the shortcomings it was a hilarious reminder of how utopian entrepreneurship can dare to be in the 21st century, but without giving up the patriarchy.
Rating: 3 stars
Disclaimer: Book offered by the publisher in exchange for an honest review
This is a great book. Loved it.
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