Rating: 
Summary: Memorable
Review: Quite simply one of the most moving and memorable novels I have ever read.
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Summary: Hope and despair.
Review: A wonderful book, wherein the whole is far greater than the sum of the parts - the parts being the individual characters considered in isolation. It is relationships, and the depiction of society which drives this book. The balance is between hope and despair, with despair predominant. The reader does not despair, and is mostly entranced. Mistry does use plot, coincidence and a bit of sentimentality in the form of the warmhearted beggar king, to "help" the reader. The book has one truly inspiring character - the uncle, an untouchable who lives near the bottom of society, suffers terrible tragedies, but is never debased nor truly defeated. Few readers will come away without their understanding of the human condition greatly expanded. A caveat: I found the beginning of the book, introducing the first character, dull, so don't give up on this book early.
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Summary: Circus of Humanity
Review: Knowing where to start is just the first problem in trying to describe or review this book. It covers the entire scope of the human condition, sparing no detail of horror or despicable behavior. Set in mid-1900's India, A Fine Balance details the political and social upheaval of an India beset with corruption, evil and unspeakable crimes against humanity, not to mention the abuses of the caste system and the indignities those of lower castes were forced to endure. In a country where begging is a profession from generation to generation, and children are stolen and deformed in order to become beggars, and where local officials build shanty towns for thousands without sanitation or fresh water and charge them outrageous prices, it is a wonder that anything productive or positive ever occurs.
What saves this novel from utter despair are the four characters, vastly different, who come together out of chance and necessity and discover that caste and position are unimportant; it is the human spirit that triumphs and makes sense of the world. When the tailors, Ishvar and Om meet Dina Dalal and college boy, Maneck, they form a family such as none of them has ever known. With each incredible adventure that befalls Ishvar and Om, the four of them come closer together until a final disaster tears their fragile family apart forever.
The desperate finality than ends the book is shocking and heartbreaking--and mostly unexpected. This fine book is thought provoking and serious as it takes the reader through the gamut of human despair and emotion, leaving one blank and empty at first, then filled again with the richness that lies underneath.
Rating:
Summary: Effective, often startling, but always beautiful
Review: If you want a book with great, memorable characters, with realism that's always effective, though not always pretty, then this is a good choice. It sheds light on the ugliness of the caste system and the corruption of the Indira Gahndi years in India. At first I was daunted by the size of this book, but it's a thoroughly enjoyable read.
It has a good ending too, not in the "happily every after" sense, but in the sense that it is skillfully crafted.
A welcome addition to the international literature genre.
I fully intend to read other works by Mistry.
Rating: 
Summary: good book, but has flaws
Review: The book was very well-written. The description of India, vivid and true. I know that what Mr Mistry writes is indeed true and still exists today. The injustices that are portrayed in the book are equally true and should not be dismissed as the products of an over imaginative author. To many, reading the book must seem like being transported to another planet where such different cultures and lives could esist.
What I would like to point out is how the coincidences make the story seem a little odd. It seemed so convenient that the two tailors knew Rajaram, monkey-man, beggarmaster and shankar. This in a city of millions of people and many slums and settlements. Om and Ishvar kept meeting Rajaram and Monkey-Man after they had of course lived in the same slum. And if it wasn't Om and Ishvar meeting them, it was Maneck after 8 years. And let us not forget the policeman who remembered the case of the person who killed the two beggars for their hair...guess who knew the killer....Yet another example would be Dina Dalal meeting the pen-loving lawyer who had met Maneck a year earlier on a train. And then, of course, Maneck meeting the lawyer 8 years later. But maybe because I finished a large part of the book at a stretch, I'm more aware of the coincidences. If you choose to ignore all of them, then the book is a great book to read. The pace is just right, no painfully slow starts and boring middle-parts but an even pace throughout. Beautiful English and great description. It leaves one feeling a little empty after finishing the book though. Yearning for justice.
Rating:
Summary: Bravo!
Review: This was an excellent novel. So sad to think of the real people who suffered in India during the "Emergency" in the seventies. A book like this makes us stop and realize how lucky we are.
Rating:
Summary: Life in the Face of Despair
Review: I finished this book a couple of days ago but have been unable to sit and write about it until now. I have to say that I could not put it down; I thoroughly enjoyed reading it and I was fascinated by its cast of characters. The setting of the scene, the descriptions of the cities and the villages was detailed and mesmerizing, and I learned a great deal about life in India during the "Emergency" during which the people suffered under Indira Ghandi's apparently inept attempts to bring some sort of order to an incredibly poor and overpopulated country with a corrupt system of government and an antiquated, cruel caste system. The atempted "cure" almost destroyed a nation that was already torn apart. The four main characters, Dina, the strong willed, hardened widow, Maneck, the sheltered young student who comes to live with her, Ishvar and Om, the tailors fleeing the horrible caste system of their village and hoping to build a new life, are well drawn and sympathetic. The array of supporting characters reveal a great deal about the best and worst that mankind is capable of: Beggars, innocents, con men, landlords, thugs, gangsters and revolutionaries. In the end, no one is perfect, and each person (and even animal!) must do his or her best to survive in a world that is seldom fair, often cruel, and never predictable. These people somehow go through their tumultuous lives with grace and courage, always seeking something to hope for, some reason to go on surviving, some future that is better than the dismal present. I could see the strength of the people and thought that Mistry did a wonderful job portraying a nation's anguish through the characters he created. Having said all that, and having enjoyed reading it as much as I did, I have to say that I was ultimately disappointed by this novel. It seemed like there was little redemption, or hope, for anyone and that every single bad thing that could happen to a poor person in India happened to these 4 characters personally. It was just too much, and in the end, the suffering inflicted on them was just too heavy handed for me as a reader to accept. There were also far too many incredible coincidences that seemed too often contrived. The writing was clean and well done, and the setting of the tale was incredibly well drawn. It just seemed as if Mistry were trying too hard to explain the beauty and pain that is his India. In seeking the balance between hope and despair, he found only despair. Characters either survived, or were destroyed, each in their own way, but the ending was totally unsatisfying for me and I felt that it weakened all that had gone before. That is ultimately why I have had such a hard time writing about this book. I wish I could have been able to say more that was positive about a novel that I sincerely enjoyed reading and about a work that is obviously well-received. Perhaps I am like the reader in the Balzac quote at the start of the book and I am blaming the author for my own "insensitivity, accusing him of wild exaggeration and flights of fancy." All is probably true, and I can tell that Mistry feels very deeply about his subject, but it seems to me that fiction should illuminate the truth in such a way as to make it seem more real, while at the same time illustrating the basic truths of existence. To merely drive the sad truth into the ground, without giving one's characters at least some feeble hope for redemption, seems like a sad and wasted effort.
Rating: 
Summary: An Unbalanced View of India
Review: "A Fine Balance" is a tale of modern India presented through the intersection of lives of four sets of people who struggle to maintain their humanity in an inhuman society. The book opens with the arrival of a pair of tailors from a rural village to the flat of a woman who is looking to begin an illegeal in-home clothing production business to supply one of the large export companies in the unnamed city in India that is the backdrop to the story. They happen to arrive simultaneously with a college student who is looking for lodging during his first year in the city. The author skillfully steps back to fill in their backgrounds and creates a rich context in which the reader can understand the factors that drive each and that produce the tension and conflict that characterize their first weeks and months together. The landlady/employer is a Parsi, a minority group of Persian background people in India who are Zoroastrians. The author beautifully captures the events and mischances that turn her bright future into a dismal present. He then weaves a gripping story of the tailors who are Hindu of outcast or Dalit backgound who seek escape from their cast-profession of animal tanning and leather work by becoming tailors. Finally, the story unfolds of the student who is from an affluent Parsi family that falls into difficulty due to the vagaries of political and social disruption that grew out of the Partion of 1947 that created India and Pakistan. Even though they were outside the primary Hindu-Muslim conflict, the student's family are swept up by the chaos and violence that ensued. Smaller vignettes bring to life characters who usually are chaff in most tales, such as a legless, fingerless street begger. Mr. Mistry uses the story to convey several messages about the fundamental inhumanity of Hindu society and the caste system which remains in place dispite legal abolition. The government is protrayed as a thoroughly corrupt entity with Indira Ghandi and the Cogress Party as the major bandits in a society that ignores laws. Ordinary people who struggle to better themselves are helpless in a fundamentally corrupt society that sanctions terror, brutality/beastiality, and nepotism. Having seen the India of which Mr. Mistry writes, I would best compare him to Charles Dickens. Where Dickens succeeds the effort to bring to light the miseries of the dispossesed, Mistry fails. Dickens skewered British society in a series of powerful novels. Mistry tries to do the same for India in one book. The result is that he has characters who figuratively are struck simultaneously by a truck and lightening as a cinder block falls eight stories from a construction site to squash their heads. All of the things that Mistry writes about did happen. To assert that they happened to the small number of people in one novel strains credibilty and leaving the reader exhausted. Despite all its shortcomings, India is a true democracy. It is not perfect, but most people on the planet who live under democratic rule live in India. The country is democratic despite poverty, crowding and disease that usually are fertile ground for authoritarian rule. The fact that Indira Ghandi's attempt to strip the country of democracy failed and her Congress Party has remained out of power for more than ten years is a very positive statement about India. This lack of balance mars an otherwise fine novel.
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Summary: "This Tragedy is not a fiction: All is true"-----
Review: "This Tragedy is not a fiction: All is true"----- Honore De Balzac's quote from Le Pere Goriot opens the book A FINE BALANCE by Rohinton Mistry. And what a tragedy! This piece of fiction-that-is-true-to-life takes place during the State of Emergency, Indira Ghandi's attempt during the mid 70's and 80's in bringing about great change to a country that was ravaged by poverty and corruption. The four central characters, Dina Dalal, Maneck Kohlah, and nephew and uncle Omprahkash and Ishvar, come together through fate, and change each other's lives forever. The evidence of class differences among the different castes is obvious as we learn about these four characters and what brought them to this point in their lives. Dina lived the life of the middle class, living in relative comfort for a good part of her life. Maneck grew up in the country, but his parents owned a store and they lived a modestly comfortable life as well. The tailors, Omprahkash and Ishvar, lived the lives of the lowest levels, but sought to make something out of their lives by breaking tradition and learning a new trade, that of making clothes. A whopping 600 pages, A FINE BALANCE is a story of the every day struggles of these four persons, who would probably never have met if it weren't for fate. They start out as strangers, but after living together and working together to stay alive, they become good friends. The book starts with Maneck taking a train trip to town to meet Dina Dalal, a widow living alone and making a modest living as a seamstress. She happens to be an old school friend of his mother's, so this seemed to be the perfect arrangement by renting a room from Dina. The extra income was to help her make ends meet, as she could barely make enough money to pay the rent. Maneck is a college student, who was so unhappy living in the college dorms that his mother helped him out by contacting this old school friend of hers. He was looking for some peace and quiet, and a chance to finish his schooling and start a new life and career. The two tailors, Omprahkash and Ishvar, are trying to make a new life for themselves after a devastating tragedy causes the death of their entire family. They learn that Dina is a seamstress that is looking for workers, and so they travel to the city and run into Maneck before they even know that Maneck himself is searching for Dina's apartment. The reason for the length of this book is that Mistry chooses to go into great detail the background of each of the four main characters. However, without this background, the reader will fail to learn the true meaning of what really happened in India during these troubled times of The Emergency. Mistry is able to depict with great imagery the poverty and suffering amongst many of India's poorest citizens. Whether Maneck's end is realistic or not, or the fate of the tailors is true-to-life, I cannot say. But what I CAN say is that this book was so engrossing that it took me only eight days to read it. Mistry has a fine talent for literature, and I will certainly read anything else he decides to put his mark on. As an American, it is hard for me to truly understand the type of lives these four led in A FINE BALANCE. But it certainly opened my eyes to another part of this world, and that not all peoples are as privileged or perhaps as lucky as we are.
Rating: 
Summary: Simple and Flat
Review: I recommend this book to someone who is interested in India, but knows nothing about it. If you are from or have spent time there, there is nothing new or shocking. The scenes are accurate and familiar, and historically correct, but it offers no new information or insight. The story about two tailors, and their relationship with Dena, their widowed employer and her paying guest, Maneck, during Indira Gandhi's imposed State of Emergency, is straight forward, and not very clever or particularly interesting. There are no twists or turns that make storytelling an art. The book is very readable, however, and the author knows how to write, but lacks any special gift for imagination. The book drags and the end seems to come straight from "Anna Karenina", but for no apparent reason. The ending is not believable, as Maneck would definitely not do what he did (I don't want to spoil the ending for anyone who might read the book in spite of this review), because he was a very unselfish character, and he would not inflict such loss and pain on his mother. I started this book with great enthusiasm, and ended bored and disappointed. Had I read it before spending six years in India (some of that time during the Emergencey), I would probably have found it somewhat fascinating with information unfamiliar to me.
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