Rohinton Mistry

[A Fine Balance] is a sweeping drama of four people who unexpectedly end up living together during a tumultuous year, 1975, in India. Dina is a middle-aged widow desperately trying to hang on to her independence, despite her brother's efforts to get her to re-marry. Maneck is a young man in the city to attend college, who left his beautiful mountain town at his parents' behest to try to better his life. The student hostel is so disgusting that he ends up renting a room from Dina, who is a distant family friend. And then there are Ishvar and Omprakash, who are tailors that end up working for Dina out of her apartment. They were also living in a rural town where their family had been on the rise out of their lower caste. But misfortunes keep arising to keep them down. The four will spend a year together during a State of Emergency declared by the Prime Minister that upends life for the lower classes in some truly horrifying and gruesome ways.

The book is grim and has moments of utter despair, pure bad luck, and unfairness. There are despicable characters, horrible deaths, and plenty of squalor. Usually I can't stomach a book like this. However, Mistry somehow balances this with some good, some lighthearted moments, and impressive writing. I was completely invested from the first chapter and just had to see where it was all going to end up. I don't think, in a book like this, it's a spoiler to say that things do not end well for all the characters. It's clear from the get go that a book this realistic will not have a fairy tale ending - though I did keep hoping for one. And I suppose that's where the title comes in. Life is "a fine balance" of hope and despair. In 1970s India, if Mistry's portrayal is at all accurate, this is all too true.… (mais)

This is an extraordinary second novel (shortlisted for the Booker). Although Mistry has his tics (he loves to throw in a big, unusual word every now and then, among other things), those tics are—I suspect—the bad habit of a young writer searching for his voice. I will be reading his other books soon, I hope, and will be interested to see how his writing evolves. But the book, you ask? In a nutshell, it follows a central core of characters from very different backgrounds thrown together by chance. We learn their individual histories and then follow them in Bombay (unnamed, but clear) during the Emergency, a truly dismal period in the mid/late 1970s. Indira Gandhi, desperate to remain in power, chose to break the law and invoke extraordinary and unlawful powers to run the country as she saw fit, regardless of consequences. This book is about those consequences. Contrived situations are few and Mistry has drawn indelible, human characters, complete with flaws as well as virtues. Some of the circumstances Mistry portrays are brutal and even painful. Yet the book contains a great deal of satisfying and even funny episodes. Mistry takes his epigraph from Balzac—a master whose writing this book resembles in many ways; from Le Père Goriot: “But rest assured: This tragedy is not a fiction. All is True.” Very highly recommended.… (mais)