Rating: 
Summary: Needs cutting
Review: I loved this book, but I do feel it would have found a wider audience if it had been cut by its editor. The book gives a wonderful survey of the first years after Independence. It follows several families from different communities. I often had to look back to see who belonged to which family. The author describes India's growing pains with intelligence and stays unbiased, something unusual in this large, multi-religous country. I do think it would have benefited by cutting some of the Parliamentary debates and the long explanations on manufacturing shoes. I also think a glossary would have helped. I lived in India for a few years and there were words I was not familar with. An explanation of what some of the holidays are would also be helpful. I was not familar with all of them. It is very welll written and I am glad I perservered.
Rating: 
Summary: Great and complex Book
Review: This was a very good book, but you must have patiance and a good memory to read it.
Rating:
Summary: The reason I read!
Review: Reading this book was one of the more beautiful times in my life. This is the reason I read. To be brought into lives and places that stay with me always! I felt like I had lost something when I finished the book and often think about it and know that I will read it again very soon. I hope beyond hope that Vikram Seth will some day decide to continue the saga of the families in this story. Do yourself a favour and read it, you won't be sorry!
Rating:
Summary: A year in India, one step at a time
Review: I've always sustained that a good writer can describe the simple ascent of a flight of stairs, and make it interesting. A bad writer can describe a truly interesting event, such as a disaster, or falling in love, or death, and render it boring. Vikram Seth's novel is an example of the former. Seth takes the lives of several well-to-do families in India during the early '50's, and follows their steps day by day for a little more than one year. He saves us no details as he describes, for about 1400 pages, the ins and outs of these families and their intertwining. He also involves us in the intricate details of the volatile political situation and the various religious and language barriers in place at that time. It is interesting to note, for example, that although India had only recently attained independence from the British Empire, English was the one common language spoken by almost all people of India, despite the individual origins. Therefore, the English language helped to unify India. One could find the main story plot rather superficial - the difficulty of finding a "Suitable Boy" for an upper class Hindi girl to marry. But this story serves only as a starting point for the branching out of many other stories of much more depth. And, in truth, I find that the individual drama of Lata, who knows that eventually she will have to marry a man who perhaps is not her ideal, at a young age when perhaps she would simply like to continue her studies and friendships and café' society, bows down to do her duty towards the family, to be quite a deep story in itself. You have to be in the right mood to read "A Suitable Boy". You have to be ready to climb that staircase one step at a time, and reflect upon each step you take.
Rating:
Summary: Superb piece of work!
Review: I prefer to stick to books of moderate length. But with Suitable Boy, even after reading over 1400 pages, I wished there was more. The characterization is very well done, esp given the number of characters involved. The Indo-Pak society and culture and the post-partition period are portrayed extremely well. Plot is simple and yet so intricate. Very engrossing indeed! Everything feels like its happening right in front of your own eyes!
Rating:
Summary: Wonderful depiction of India and a great epic story!
Review: This is certainly one of the best books I have ever read and is an astonishing achievement! Being of Pakistani origin, I found I could empathise more with the Muslim characters in the book than with some of the others but Vikram Seth's superbly detailed accounts ensured that none of the characters were un-interesting. I was particularly enthralled by the characters of Saeeda Bai, the courtesan, and Firoz and Maan as well as the Ustad of classical music. This was what was so great about the book. It seemed as if all of India was here, in front of me as I read this book. Princes, businessmen, academics, paupers, villagers, tanners, untouchables, priests, mullahs, imams, Urdu, Hindi, English...the wonderful scents and colours painted a great and detailed canvas of Indian life. Seth's erudition too becomes clear from his excellent rendition of the ghazals of Ghalib and Mir into English during, perhaps, my favourite section of the book which was the musical performance given by Saeeda Bai in Mahesh Kapoor's house. Simply wonderful!
Rating:
Summary: Engaging, fun, and well worth the read.............
Review: A Suitable Boy, while not entirely engrossing, is certainly an engaging read that, despite its formidable heft, reads briskly, jaunting along at a clip that makes the pages fly by. I formed a remarkable attachment to the main characters, the formation of which is the singular achievement of this effort. A Suitable Boy contains some delightful humor, thought provoking relationships and a welcoming window into the life of an Indian family. In the end, it is, perhaps, a book that provides simply good entertainment.
Rating:
Summary: Get Lost
Review: This book is lush and good enough to snuggle up with. The characters are rich and interesting and I learned a lot about India and its people, history and customs. Literate enough to make you feel like you're reading something good for your mind, this book is also quite delicious as we delve into the characters' lives. Did you like "Bonfire of the Vanities"? So did I.
Rating:
Summary: Engrossing, but it loses its step
Review: My instinct while reading A Suitable Boy was to compare it to Middlemarch; I guess that was due to the sprawling scope of the book. As I finished Seth's book, two nights ago, I thought of Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart. I was reminded of Okonkwo's decisions when I read of Lata's. I don't want to 'give away the story,' but I felt Seth forced his plot along at several points -- particularly about three quarters of the way through, when Maan and Firoz speak to one another in Saeeda Bae's room. It read to me as if Seth had written himself into a rich world and then compromised the integrity of his characters in order to force the ending he'd originally intended to lead us to. The best example I can think of is that, after 1200 pages of a limited omniscience in our narrator, Seth stops describing Lata's thoughts and emotions to us just as she's making the choice around which the entire book has been structured. I found this extremely disturbing, as if an intimate friend suddenly had developed a distant reserve toward me. I agree with many of the reader comments here; when I finished this novel I felt bereft. Partly, though, that was because Seth withdrew the characters from me well before the book ended. Seeing Lata as a sort of sleepwalker rather than as an actively intelligent, emotional person was haunting. I felt she'd been beaten down. That's how she reminded me of Okonkwo, I guess. And I've been debating to myself, over the past two days, whether Seth would have intended her to come across that way.
Rating:
Summary: Rich and Panoramic, but Not Perfect
Review: Vikram Seth's first book, A Suitable Boy, is an epic tale of India, set in the turbulent period following independence and partition. Although extremely long, this is a book that never plods or bogs down. It takes a look at India through the lives of four very extended families, both Hindu and Moslem: the Mehras; the Kapoors, whose most prominent member, the charming if rather feckless Maan Kapoor, falls deeply in love with a Moslem singer and courtesan; the Khans, who are Moslem, and whose son Firoz is a close friend of Maan's, a friendship which eventually results in near-tragedy; and the Chatterjis a family of brilliant and highly Anglicized young men and women: Amit, the poet and novelist, Dipankar the would-be mystic, and Meenakshi and Kakoli, two beautiful and amoral sisters who continually exchange verse couplets with each other in a sort of verbal tennis match of wit. Rounding out the cast of characters are the families' friends, enemies, neighbors, servants, gurus and lovers. The central plot involves a love story that runs through the book like the Ganges. The most fully-realized and emotionally-engaging character in A Suitable Boy is Mrs. Rupa Mehra. Based loosely on Seth's own grandmother, Mrs. Rupa Mehra has only one mission left in life: to arrange a proper marriage for her youngest daughter, Lata. In other words, she wishes to find Lata "a suitable boy." Mother and daughter are a generation apart in their ideas, but, surprisingly, they eventually do reach an agreement of sorts, and, as they do, they find that they are closer than they had ever imagined. Mrs. Rupa Mehra, however, is a woman who is determined to take care of her family at any cost, to take care of them even if they do not wish to be taken care of. Seth sums her up this way, "Mrs. Rupa Mehra, torn between solicitude for Pran, concern for Savita, who was due to deliver any day now, and desperate anxiety on behalf of Lata, would have liked nothing better than to have an emotional breakdown. But the press of events would not allow it at present, and she therefore abstained." Mrs. Rupa Mehra, is indeed, a remarkable character, and not one that is soon forgotten. She is vividly drawn and seems to leap off the page with energy, vitality and wit. A Suitable Boy is straightforward, no-frills storytelling. There are, mercifully, no verbal pyrotechnics here, no extended dream sequences, no magic realism or any of the other literary devices that can be so wonderful but only when employed by an author who really knows what he is doing. Seth wisely sticks to his story and the result is an almost-Victorian rendering. This is one of those books in which the author's "voice" is almost anonymous or silent and that is just as it should be. With a sprawling plot and a large cast of characters, a strong sense of "style" or "voice," sometimes so essential, would have only been an intrusion in a novel such as this. One of the themes of A Suitable Boy is religious intolerance. In 1952, India was still recovering from the horrors of partition. Muslim Pakistan had separated from the sub-continent and Brahmpur, the invented city where much of the action of A Suitable Boy takes place, is involved in the construction of a Hindu temple adjacent to an existing mosque. In fact, the temple was deliberately erected on that very spot so that when the Muslims gather for their daily prayers and kneel to face Mecca, they will be forced to face Hindu idols as well, idols they, themselves, consider obscene. Seth, himself, has said that he has no sympathy for Hindu fanatics and considers A Suitable Boy to be a plea for religious tolerance in India. Politics also plays a role in A Suitable Boy and Nehru, himself, makes a few appearances. The sections in which Seth does veer off into politics or religion are less successful than the sections that involve the four families directly. I was tempted to skip many of the more political sections of the book, but didn't. Another minor problem crops up in a certain vagueness about the language the characters are speaking. Although this might not seem to matter, it does matter and matters greatly because the characters, themselves, make much of it. Lata's very pompous brother Arun, for example, often scorns Haresh, Lata's husband-to-be, because his English is less than perfect, although Haresh has studied in England while Arun has never even been there. A delightful bit of irony. Although not a perfect book, and one that, at times, could stand a little more smoothness, A Suitable Boy is a rich and panoramic look at India during a crucial time in her history as well as being a delightful and incisive novel that is well worth the time one must devote to its more than 1500 pages.
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