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Loading... The Lives of Others (edition 2014)by Neel Mukherjee
Work InformationThe Lives of Others by Neel Mukherjee
Booker Prize (126) Books Read in 2015 (410) » 6 more Loading...
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I was very eager to read this book because I generally love fiction about India and this seemed very promising. But it was long and dull and predictable, and the characters seem more like cliches than people. A disappointment, and all the more so because it made today's Booker shortlist over Orfeo and The Bone Clocks. Tsk tsk, Booker judges. ( ) I was very eager to read this book because I generally love fiction about India and this seemed very promising. But it was long and dull and predictable, and the characters seem more like cliches than people. A disappointment, and all the more so because it made today's Booker shortlist over Orfeo and The Bone Clocks. Tsk tsk, Booker judges. The lives of others is set in West Bengal from 1966 to 1970, with two epilogues set much later, one in 1986 and the other in 2012. It centres on the Ghoshes, a well-to-do family whose wealth comes from paper mills. By the time the novel opens, business is starting to fail, so there is tension in the air, exacerbating the rivalries, envies and secrecies which characterise the family’s relationships. That’s the personal, but this book is also political, because one of the characters, a grandson of the old couple, becomes a revolutionary with the Naxalites, a section of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) (or, CPI-M). In 1967, they commenced radical action to redistribute land to landless farmers and labourers. The book’s chronology mirrors the early years of this movement, but that's only part of the death of this engrossing story: For my full review, please see: https://whisperinggums.com/2015/12/18/neel-mukherjee-the-lives-of-others-review/
It takes a while to get to know all the men, women and children, but the story is always gripping, and there are various time-bombs that suddenly change the way we see the book's whole world. One of Mukherjee's great gifts is precisely his capacity to imagine the lives of others.
1967, Calcutta. Unnoticed by his family, Supratik has become dangerously involved in student unrest, agitation, extremist political activism. Compelled by an idealistic desire to change his life and the world around him; all he leaves behind is a note. His family begins unraveling as the society around it fractures. This is a moment of turbulence, of inevitable and unstoppable change: the chasm between the generations, and between those who have and those who have not, has never been wider. No library descriptions found. |
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