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Summary: Mistry Creates a Literary Feast
Review: A reader must show a commitment to get through this 713 page novel, but the experience will be very rewarding and pleasurable. A Fine Balance is a balance indeed, weighing hope against despair, strength against sorrow, pain against pleasure and love against loss. The reader is lucky, for Rohinton includes enough material, texture, detail and character development in A Fine Balance to fill several books. Despite its size, the book is hard to put down (I often caught myself sneaking a few pages while waiting for elevators) and very hard to forget. My mind often drifted back to the characters for days after I finished the book. While many of us are lucky enough not to have been brought up in the miserable conditions of mid seventies India, we can still appreciate and identify with many of the characters' struggles and trails in the context of our own lives.
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Summary: The balance tilts, in Mistry's favor
Review: Yes, it does require a fine balance, between hope and despair, between good and evil, and between writing about scrounging beggars and peeping into the psyche of well to do businessmen. And Mistry has mastered this art of balance with amazing dexterity. His descriptions are so graphic that you could see the characters leaping out of the pages right in front of you. Quite a pity that people not familiar with the political history, language and lifestyles of the Indian subcontinent might find themselves at a loss to understand the finer points, but then, as one of the characters in the novel says, "Loss is part and parcel of that necessary calamity called life." Brilliant piece of work. One word of caution though. People who get bouts of depression very easily are advised to stay away from the book.
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Summary: I feel like I've traveled to India.
Review: I immediately became swept up in this story. When people ask me where I've traveled, I have to stop myself from telling them I've been to India. This book will take you there, and leave you heartbroken when you finish it.
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Summary: The Brilliant Aftermath of The Raj
Review: The intellectual boy from the mountains comes close to falling in love with "Dina Auntie" but never quite does.... leaving that thrist. Passions are of the intense, impulsive nature - but the spiritual "book-that-will-change-lives" impact wasn't there for me. I have had more spiritual fulfilment with, say, food. The Chammars have their NasBandi done and one has his legs cut off - story of our lives, as far as society is concerned anyway. The two try to survive in the personas of tailors but the cruel city makes them spiral down the economic vine to become successful beggars guaranteed the physical mutilation at the hands of the Big Guy. Chaos of the subcontinent perpetuates poverty, prejudice and other P's that stand for our plagues.... Well written,though, without a heed to the fact that the audience could be non-Hindi speaking. Urdu curse words so close to our hearts well amalgamated into the English narrative...for once one feels good about the Raj having blessed Rohinton with the legacy of a superb literary medium of expression. Nasty at times vigorously sexy.
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Summary: One of the finest novels of our time....
Review: In A Fine Balance, Mistry has written an unforgettable social commentary vibrantly centered around extraordinary normal characters. He weaves the tale with a deep understanding of the Indian society beneath the surface, and conveys both his knowledge and his frustration in a novel evocative of a morality play.What is perhaps most striking about this book is its setup. In contrast to most novels, the book does not follow the Shakespearean five act format, with a denoument in the fourth act. Instead, the tale begins broad and ends with no questions answered, and nearly every answer is a question. I cannot recommend a book more strongly.
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Summary: Pleasurable like a 19th century novel
Review: I'm glad to know that some people write them like they used to! What pleasure it is to read a realistic novel with interesting characters and plot that the reader actually cares about. Here the characters are seen pretty much from the outside, as was the fashion 100 years ago before writers delved into the interior psyche, but with no loss of interest. I can't tell you how much I cared about the four main characters, especially the two tailors whose lives were so filled with tragedy but who managed to endure with their humor and humanity intact. I think that the reason the characters engaged me so much was that the author himself showed great compassion for them. It's been a long time since I read a book that contained such sweetness; it's a great antidote for so much of the negativity of modern fiction. I must say, however, that I was disturbed by the ending of the book--it was too terrible. And I feel that what happened to Maneck was contrived and not quite believable. This book is really better than those of a writer like Dickens because it has a lot of the positive attributes--interesting, unique characters and humor--without some of the lesser qualities--sentimentality and excessive exaggeration. This book is long, but it is very good.
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Summary: one of the best novels that I've ever read
Review: A really wonderful book describing the trials and tribulations, hope and despair of four people, brought together by circumstances in the crowded city of Bombay (though the city is never explicitly named), set during the Emergency years. As one of the review comments in the back cover said, the book "transforms our understanding of life". I thought it was as good as any work of Seth or Rushdie, good enough to make one read it again and again (I've read it thrice).
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Summary: Incredible masterpiece
Review: This is one of the finest fictions I have read in a long time. I got completely immersed in the characters and felt that I had lived the experience with them by the end of the book. Mistry truly has an incredible storytelling ability - the imagery in the book is so vivid and unfortunately the events quite close to reality in India, that it makes the book all the more powerful. A must read!
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Summary: Wonderfully Written Novel
Review: Rohinton Mistry has written with great eloquence. This book is highly recommended and is throughly enjoyable till the end.
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Summary: Unforgettable, a glorious novel
Review: A Fine Balance is simply one of the finest novels I have ever read. A story of India, of poverty, of hardship,of humanity but most importantly and most movingly, a story of the importance and power of friendship. This is a long book and when I first picked it up I wondered if it was destined to become one of those books I would never finish. NOTHING distracted me from my reading of A Fine Balance. Instead I have read it twice and I look forward to revisiting it again - until that is, Rohinton Mistry does us all a favor and writes another novel as glorious as this. An absolute must read.
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