A Fine Balance

A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry

Fiction

1995 Vintage Books

Finished on January 16, 2023

(First read in 1997)

Rating: 4/5 (Very Good)

Original Rating: 5/5 (Excellent)

Publisher's Blurb:

With a compassionate realism and narrative sweep that recall the work of Charles Dickens, this magnificent novel captures all the cruelty and corruption, dignity and heroism, of India.

The time is 1975. The place is an unnamed city by the sea. The government has just declared a State of Emergency, in whose upheavals four strangers--a spirited widow, a young student uprooted from his idyllic hill station, and two tailors who have fled the caste violence of their native village--will be thrust together, forced to share one cramped apartment and an uncertain future.

As the characters move from distrust to friendship and from friendship to love, A Fine Balance creates an enduring panorama of the human spirit in an inhuman state.

Twenty-five years ago, I read A Fine Balance with an online book group. I remember falling in love with the story and characters, losing myself for hours in Mistry's evocative narrative. I gave the book a 5-star rating and went on to make it one of my favorite recommendations while working at Barnes & Noble. When we moved to Oregon, one of the members in my book group mentioned how much she enjoyed the book, and I encouraged her to nominate it for one of our selections last year. I wasn't able to attend the discussion, but I started reading the novel in September, only to set it aside for a few months. I picked it up again in December and couldn't put it down. Dina, Ishvar, Omprakash (Om, for short), and Maneck, who are so well-drawn and memorable, each worked their way into my heart, warts and all.

After all these years, I'd forgotten so much about the plot and was stunned by the turn of events as the conclusion drew near. I love a big book that pulls me in, invading my thoughts when I'm not reading, but unlike my recent read (Coming Home by Rosamunde Pilcher), this chunkster did not leave me feeling happy and hopeful. A Fine Balance is a heartbreaking story of four individuals who grow to care for one another, creating a non-traditional family within the confines of their small abode, struggling to survive during India's State of Emergency in the 70s. I didn't love this literary novel quite as much as the first time I read it, but it's an enlightening work, worthy of all the accolades and awards.

Highly recommend.

Looking Back - A Fine Balance

Looking Back... In an effort to transfer my book journal entries over to this blog, I'm going to attempt to post (in chronological order) an entry every Friday. I may or may not add extra commentary to what I jotted down in these journals.

A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry
Fiction
1995 Vintage
Finished in November 1997
Rating: 5/5 (Excellent!)

Publisher's Blurb:

With a compassionate realism and narrative sweep that recall masters from Balzac to Dickens, this magnificent novel captures all the cruelty and corruption, dignity and heroism, of India. The time is 1975. The place is an unnamed city by the sea. The government has just declared a State of Emergency, in whose upheavals four strangers--a spirited widow, a young student uprooted from his idyllic hill station, and two tailors who have fled the caste violence of their native village--will be thrust together, forced to share one cramped apartment and an uncertain future.

As Rohinton Mistry's characters move from distrust to friendship and from friendship to love, A Fine Balance creates an enduring panorama of the human spirit in an inhuman state.

My Original Notes (1997):

Great novel, although pretty long. (603 pages)

Wonderfully descriptive. Harsh realities of life during this time period. I learned a lot about India and the caste system.

I highly recommend this book!

My Current Thoughts:

When I was working at Barnes & Noble, this is one of those books that would often come up in conversation with customers when asked about some of my favorite books. I remember how much I loved losing myself in Mistry's marvelous novel, not wanting it to end, in spite of its length. I can still recall several scenes from the story, but most of the details are long forgotten. I've moved this book from Nebraska to Texas, back to Nebraska and now to Oregon, with hopes of reading it a second time. Will it still have the same magic? With so many unread books on my shelves, not to mention the investment in time to re-read it, it seems doubtful. Maybe I'll get it on Audible.com and give it a listen instead, but I'm not ready to get rid of my copy. Maybe I can suggest it to my book club.

The Space Between Us

The Space Between Us by Thrity Umrigar
Fiction
2006 William Morrow
Finished on February 13, 2016
Rating: 4.5/5 (Terrific!)

Publisher's Blurb:

Devastating in its power, remarkable in its achievement, The Space Between Us is a searing, addictively readable novel that vividly captures the delicate balance of class and gender in contemporary India--witnessed through the lives of two compelling women.

They are sitting in the dining room, sipping tea, Sera out of the blue-gray mug Dinaz had bought for her from Cottage Industries, Bhima out of the stainless-steel glass that is kept aside for her in the Dubash household. As usual, Sera sits on a chair at the table while Bhima squats on her haunches on the floor nearby. When Dinaz was younger, she used to prod her mother about the injustice of Bhima not being allowed to sit on the couch or a chair and having to use her own separate utensils instead of the ones the rest of the family used.

"Now, Dinaz," Sera would say mildly. "I think there's a slight difference between burning a Harijan and not allowing Bhima to use our glasses. Do you want her lips to touch our glasses?"

Now, watching Bhima sip at her tea, Sera shifts uncomfortably in her chair. Since Feroz's death, she has occasionally toyed with the idea of asking Bhima to join her at the table. Sure, some of her friends would be scandalized at first, and the next time a servant in the building asked her mistress for a raise, the woman would automatically blame Sera Dubash for setting a bad example. But what difference did it make to her what the neighbors said?

And yet... The thought of Bhima sitting on her furniture repulses her. There is this reluctance, this resistance to let Bhima use the furniture. As they sit in companionable silence sipping their tea, Sera tries to justify her prejudice.

I had the ARC of The Space Between Us for over a decade before I finally decided it was time to give it a try. I'm so glad one of my friends kept encouraging me to read this book. It was outstanding! The details of Umrigar's story create a strong sense of place and I had no problem envisioning Sera and Bhima's lives in Bombay. It's been years since I read Rohinton Mistry's excellent novel, A Fine Balance, but as soon as I began reading The Space Between Us, I had the same reaction and fell deep into the world of India.

In the old days, at least the women were spared the elbowing and jostling that occurred each time a bus appeared like a mythical beast at the stop. But in today's Bombay, it was everybody for himself, and the frail, the weak, the young, and the old entered the overflowing buses at their own peril. Bhima felt as if she barely recognized the city anymore--something snarling and mean and cruel had been unleashed in it. Bhima could see the signs of this new meanness everywhere: slum children tied firecrackers to the tails of the stray dogs and then laughed and clapped with glee as the poor animals ran around in circles, going mad with fear. Affluent college students went berserk if a five-year-old beggar child smudged the windows of their gleaming BMWs and Hondas. Every day Serabai would read the newspaper and tell Bhima about some latest horror--a union organizer being bludgeoned to death for daring to urge factory workers to agitate for a two-rupee wage raise; a politician's son being found not guilty after running over three slum children on his way to a party; an elderly Parsi couple being murdered in their beds by a servant who had worked for them for forty years; young Hindu nationalists writing congratulatory notes in their own blood to celebrate India's successful test of a nuclear weapon. It was as if the city was mad with greed and hunger; power and impotence; wealth and poverty.

I love this passage about the ocean:

And now she finally understands what she has always observed on people's faces when they are at the seaside. Years ago, when she and Gopal used to come to here, she would notice how people's faces turned slightly upward when they stared at the sea, as if they were straining to see a trace of God or were hearing the silent humming of the universe; she would notice how, at the beach, people's faces became soft and wistful, reminding her of the expressions on the faces of the sweet old dogs that roamed the streets of Bombay. As if they were all sniffing the salty air for transcendence, for something that would allow them to escape the familiar prisons of their own skin. In the temples and the shrines, their heads were bowed and their faces small, fearful, and respectful, shrunk into insignificance by the ritualized chanting of the priests. But when they gazed at the sea, people held their heads up, and their faces became curious and open, as if they were searching for something that linked them to the sun and the stars, looking for that something they knew would linger long after the wind had erased their footprints in the dust. Land could be bought, sold, owned, divided, claimed, trampled, and fought over. The land was stained permanently with pools of blood; it bulged and swelled under the outlines of the countless millions buried under it. But the sea was unspoiled and eternal and seemingly beyond human claim. Its waters rose and swallowed up the scarlet shame of spilled blood.

Final Thoughts:

This was an excellent read! I didn't want it to end and found myself slowing down as the ending drew closer. This certainly isn't a mystery, but at one point near the end of the book, I was dumbstruck after a detail was revealed. "Wow! I never saw that coming," I thought.

Umrigar is a great storyteller and I look forward to reading more of her novels. As luck would have it, I own a copy of The World We Found, which was published in 2012 and sounds quite enticing!

The Namesake

The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri
Contemporary Fiction
2003 Mariner Books
291 pages
Finished on 9/12/08
Rating: 3/5 (Above Average)




Product Description

Jhumpa Lahiri's debut story collection, Interpreter of Maladies, took the literary world by storm when it won the Pulitzer Prize in 2000. Fans who flocked to her stories will be captivated by her best-selling first novel, now in paperback for the first time. The Namesake is a finely wrought, deeply moving family drama that illuminates this acclaimed author's signature themes: the immigrant experience, the clash of cultures, the tangled ties between generations.

The Namesake takes the Ganguli family from their tradition-bound life in Calcutta through their fraught transformation into Americans. On the heels of an arranged wedding, Ashoke and Ashima Ganguli settle in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where Ashoke does his best to adapt while his wife pines for home. When their son, Gogol, is born, the task of naming him betrays their hope of respecting old ways in a new world. And we watch as Gogol stumbles along the first-generation path, strewn with conflicting loyalties, comic detours, and wrenching love affairs.

With empathy and penetrating insight, Lahiri explores the expectations bestowed on us by our parents and the means by which we come to define who we are.

I was immediately captivated by this book, falling easily into Lahiri's marvelous storytelling with its vivid, cinemagraphic detail and sense of place. Yet, in spite of the ease of readability, the novel falls flat. It's a story of a life very much like everyone's: birth, childhood, college, career, dating, marriage, and death. Nothing remarkable occurs during the narrative. There is no suspense. No tension. No conflict. No resolution. The prose isn't even remarkable. And yet, Lahiri has the ability to draw her reader into Gogol's life; she makes us eager to see where it leads, eager to learn about Bengali customs.

I don't mind a quiet, contemplative novel; The Samurai's Garden comes to mind (although it is far superior to Lahiri's debut novel, with its evocative and lyrical prose). I enjoy learning about other cultures; Rohinton Mistry's A Fine Balance is a superb example, with its fabulous characterization and richly drawn plot. However, The Namesake plods along, laboring under the weight of boring piles of insignificant, tiresome minutia. There's nothing to drive the story forward other than the all too-predictable sequence of events. I would've liked to have learned more about how the characters felt and their insights into love and life, rather than where they lived and what they ate. I wanted to known more about Ashima (Gogol's mother) and how she felt about her life in the United States instead of following Gogol, who, let's face it, is a pretty boring protagonist. Fortunately, Lahiri managed to maintain my interest enough so I could finish the book for my book club. I wonder if I would've completed it without that commitment. If anything, I'm inspired to re-read A Fine Balance. Now that's a great book!