This is a great book An Indian version of Pride and Prejudice does not begin to do it justice. ( )

A 1500 page tome, which keeps you gripped throughout the voyage of reading it. That which starts of as the story of a girl in search of her suitable boy spans an entire nation. Set in a background of Post indepedent India, the reader travels through the dusty roads of rural provinces and is visibly pleased by a glittering, shimmering urbane populace. The myriad characters are etched out in the reader's mind so clearly that they seem so living and alive. As the characters go gallivanting through the streets of Calcutta, one is pleasantly rewarded by much mirth, laughter and rhyming couplets
I would urge every serious reader of English fiction to undertake this pleasantly rewarding journey. ( )

It seems to me an amazing feat, as a writer, simply to be able to keep all the threads of a story clear through 1500 pages, but, of course, Vikram Seth does a lot more. The book never lost my interest from the first chapter when I quickly became involved with Lata,(the just slightly younger sister of the woman being married in chapter one, who is being told by her mother that she too will marry a boy of her mother's choice) and her whole web of relationships.

One level of the novel is, of course, the personal stories, and Seth does a good job of presenting people in their complexity. Besides Lata, I was also very caught up in the drama(s) of Maan, the son of a politician who seems a sort of lazy, charming wastral at the beginning, but gains in character as the novel progresses, despite his troubles; of Haresh who is making his way in the world through his own resources and hard work in the shoe business, despite it's association with the lower class; of Bhaskar, the 9 year old math prodigy; and Rasheed who does his best to bring justice to his village and suffers for it, among others.

Another level is the presence of family, and their influence. It might be difficult in the U.S. for someone with a good relationship to their family to go against their wishes to marry whom you like, but nonetheless we see it as an individual decision. And probably, most of us, hold a romantic relationship/marriage relationship as being individual and of more important than any other aside from parent/child. It is not only the influence of family on relationship choices that Seth makes clear, but also, a different attitude towards "passion" in a relationship. Nonetheless, Lata does not feel very different from any other young woman, and so it is easier to enter into her values.

The time period of the novel is just after Indian independence and the partition of Pakistan and India. There are many cultural and political events that we experience from the point of view of characters in the novel, such as the violence of partition (although this is retrospective in the novel) and the resulting tension between Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, etc., the efforts to distribute land from big landowners to the peasants who actually work the land, the divisions that occurred between factions in the Congress party and the election of 1952. It is interesting to get the sort of home grown view of Nehru.

Once I finished the novel, I started reading India after Gandhi and although I haven't gotten very far, already it has been enriching to have the novel in my head as I read about the same historical events and personalities in a history.

This is a very rich book, and, even at the very end, I felt I would have enjoyed reading even more about these characters. ( )

One of my favourite books of all. ( )

One of the characters in this book is a poet who is writing a novel. The novel in progress is described as a river, like the Ganga, with lots of tributaries and creeks. This image, of course, stands as an emblem of the method of A Suitable Boy itself, and is one of the very rare metafictional devices in a book that is otherwise wholly without any trace of modernity. It’s as if Seth is writing from a space uninfluenced by modernism, magical realism, hyperrealism, post-structuralism, deconstruction, or any of the other games beloved by post-modernist novelists and theorists. No tricks with narrative sequence or voice or point of view, or implied readers brought to the surface, or fractured and blended images, funny voices or intertextual cleverness. What we have instead is a slow and measured unfolding of events and scenes in one, organic, huge, all-encompassing magisterial narrative in the mid Victorian style; an Indian Trollope or Dickens or early Eliot, or Balzac; or indeed a modern Mahabharata....

Read the full review on The Lectern:

http://thelectern.blogspot.com/2009/0... ( )