2007 ( )

A FINE BALANCE by Rohinton Mistry is a sprawling novel set in India in 1975. The lives of four main characters are played out against the turbulence of the Indira Ghandi regime.

I'm not interested in novels that are really pushing a political or social point of view disguised as a story. Mistry doesn’t fall into this trap. He tells a story of poor people and makes us feel compassion for a widow, a university student, and two tailors who end up thrown together in a small apartment with little in the way of utilities or amenities in an unidentified city.

Each character is given plenty of space in this 603 page novel to have his/her story told. Somewhere midway through the novel their lives come together. There are many nice, moving moments, but ultimately this story is even more depressing than Carson McCuller’s THE HEART IS A LONELY HUNTER. Despite that, I enjoyed most of it and felt a compulsion to keep reading it as often as I could until I finished.

This is not a novel to read if you are at a down point in your life. Definitely don’t read it if you’re feeling suicidal and have a loaded handgun in the nightstand by your bed.

Mistry gives a good look at a way of life many of us have never experienced, a way of life no one should have to experience. This is an important novel. Read it when you can deal with a really depressing story. ( )

A moving portrayal of the lives of four people who were caught up in the brutal, sweeping policies of 1970s India during the State of Emergency rule of Indira Gandhi.

Dina, a 40-ish widow, is determined to be an independent woman in a society where women cannot and do not have a say; Ishvar and his nephew Om are from the untouchables but, through immense courage and determination on the part of his father/grandfather, have managed to escape the bondage of caste and become tailors in the city; Maneck is a sensitive boy from a well-to-do family in a mountain town who needed to train for a career because the family business was declining. They are brought together when Dina decides to hire the tailors, and to let a room in order to support herself financially. They are first suspicious of and then eventually adjust to each other, become friends and even live together convivially. There is a brief respite from the despair each has previously known, life is still a daily struggle but it is less difficult, and happiness seems to be within reach.

The chaos of political events unleashed by the State of Emergency reach them and their lives start moving beyond their control quickly and insanely. Rampant corruption, harassment and violence, fear and terror started to rule, sparing nobody. The government imposes drastic, brutal policies in the name of political stability and economic development, policies such as forced eviction which left thousands homeless, forced labor in big infrastructure projects, and forced sterilization. Our friends go from bad to worse, and from then it was just from one misfortune to another. There were points along the story where I just wished Ishvar and Om to die – that would have been kinder to them. Yet they survive. And I think, indeed, why should I, the reader, be spared the inconvenient truth that in real life, many of the poor and destitute had actually gone through and survived the viciousness of that period in their history? Mistry pushes us, relentlessly, beyond our comfort zones.

I call this novel a story with a heart. The author writes with sympathy, without being sentimental. We recognize the characters -- they dream, they despair, they laugh, they hope, they feel pain, they get angry, they get jealous, they find change difficult but eventually accept their fates, they don't trust politicians. Mistry writes of big, serious themes and of small, ordinary lives. The novel raises sensitive issues of class conflict, ethnic conflict, gender, dispossession, and political repression, and how invariably the first ones to get sucked up in the vortex are the weak, the small, the powerless, the defenseless, the disenfranchised. He describes with vivid and realistic imagery the cruel and hard life of the untouchables in rural India, the squalid poverty of the shantytowns and the homeless in the streets of the city, the pervading cultural myopia, and the brutality of an oppressive regime.

The story is tragic, monumentally tragic even. Adversities came in waves, and while circumstances could have easily crushed or corrupted them, these four friends were never pathetic, were never wretched in their souls. The balance between hope and despair is very fine indeed. A big novel that at another time (and another place) might have been banned for tackling potentially inflammatory issues.

Highly recommended. ( )

The five characters of A Fine Balance, converge in a crowded apartment in a nameless Indian city, face a variety of horrors-a lingering, repressive caste system, the corrupt and callous government of Indira Gandhi's Emergency, the heartlessness of unchecked capitalism, and an environment that is both unhealthy and demoralizing. A moving tragedy. ( )

Beautifully written and ingenuously plotted, but unflinching in depiction of poverty, communal violence, and corruption in 1970s India. And it's long. The ending didn't satisfy me either. "A Fine Balance" was Mistry's second novel, and a Booker Prize nominee, and it does make me interested in read other works by this author. ( )