Interesting read... very Eastern in feel- contemplative, subtly evocative and wandering in the telling. ( )

Story of a yong man in a remote town in India who falls in love with a French woman tourist. Good insight into the incredible rift between first and third world--a rift not easily bridged by love. ( )

This is a book about a young Indian, Samar, who moves to Benares after a life spent in small towns. Quite naive and inexperienced, in Benares he meets people - Indian and Western - whose backgrounds and experiences are alien to him. He is drifting through life, with no clear drive or direction, often dislocated from his surroundings - and his encounters with these new people exacerbate these tendencies in him.

The book touches on several themes. One is about detachment - from life, emotions, friends, family - and its opposite, human connections (and love). Do human connections just lock us into a world of illusion, which we are unable to give up? or is detachment simply a sterile refusal to engage with the world and with other people?

Another is about choice. Samar is astounded by the way that the Europeans and Americans talk about their lives - the choices that they feel open to them - choosing to live in another country, choosing to convert to another religion, choosing what their life will be to fit their self-image. Ultimately the book concludes that the Westerners are privileged, more than anything else, because they have these choices - and their impact on the people they meet in India is compounded by their inability to understand that other people don't have these choices.

Another, minor, theme is about misunderstandings, particularly between cultures: the tendency to exoticise other cultures, and the way it feels to be the subject of this, is brilliantly highlighted in a conversation between an American and a European, where the American enthuses about the lack of inhibitions in European fiction and films - and the Frenchwoman responds rather tetchily that she's missing the point. At the same time, Mishra suggests that human nature is not all that different - comparing the lives of young men moving to the big city of Benares to the characters in Flaubert's Sentimental Education - "the small, unnoticed tragedies of thwarted hopes and ideals". (I appreciated the way that the foreigners were portrayed. The book highlights the ironies of their life in India, but does so - unusually for the subject - without any sneering. The contradictions are inherent in their situation rather than arising from any lack of good will on their part.)

There were a lot of things I really liked about this book. Firstly, the descriptions of India are simple, but very evocative - whether Mishra is talking about the cities, the countryside or the mountains. Try this description of a rickshaw ride in the rain: "The rain flowed down the windscreen, which the driver kept wiping with a rag that lay on the dashboard. Gleamingly vivid for one moment, the streets dissolved into smudgy fluorescent colours the next. Passing scooters and autorickshaws kept spraying thick jets of muddy water from the waterlogged road into the back seat". The descriptions, and Samar's drifting, introspective nature, make this a book that you need to read slowly and savour. I did have one problem with it, though, which is that there were a lot of incidents which seemed as if they ought to be significant, and yet I couldn't figure out what that significance was. Take the title, for example - which of the characters are the romantics?

Still, I would certainly like to read the book again, and maybe next time I will have more answers. ( )

The Romantics by Pankaj Mishra, is story about desire of first intimate but short-lived affair and narration of East meeting West & temptations which comes with that encounter of cultures

more @ http://toogood2read.blogspot.com/2007...

I beautiful, lightly sketched potrait of an indian guy in late 20th century india. I loved the fact, that he was perfectly likeable, despite being a person who had few strong opinions. He seemed to be buffetted along by the people he was with at the time and the feeling she had about them. ( )