A Fine Balance (Oprah's Book Club)
by Rohinton Mistry
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Book Summary Information
Author: Rohinton MistryEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 2001-11-30
ISBN: 140003065X
Number of pages: 624
Publisher: Vintage
Book Reviews of A Fine Balance (Oprah's Book Club)
Book Review: Delectable and Disturbing
Summary: 4 Stars
This is not a book for the faint of heart. It relates the interwoven histories of four main characters and several peripheral individulas who impact on their lives. Try to imagine people who are floating together in one huge river in India, a river that is made up of currents of brutality, avarice, corruption and cruelty - all blending and separating and rejoining in a nonending and inescapable life force. The characters never get out. At times they may escape some, or all, of these currents, but only for a short while, and never long enough to be able to stand upright and make a break for the shore.
In the end, some of the characters are destroyd by their toxic environment; others survive and manage to keep (varying amounts of) their spirits alive; none of them are able to get what they wanted out of life.
Both the most beautiful and the most terrible thing about reading this book is that Mr. Mistry's writing is so transcendent that the reader is sucked into the characters' river of despair, comes to know and love its inhabitants, and suffers with them. I had to put the book down several times and come back to it after I had time to catch my breath and regain my equilibrium. Perhaps it is worse if, like me, you have visited India and know that Mr. Mistry is not making this up. His characters may be fictional but their experiences are true.
Summary of A Fine Balance (Oprah's Book Club)
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.
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