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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.… (more)
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.
A third of the way through the half-mile walk from the landlord's house to his hut, Nitai Das's feet begin to sway. (Prologue)
Around six, the zoo starts to shake itself up from its brief sleep.
A reclusive Indian mathematician, who was a child prodigy, has won the Fields Meal, the highest honor given to a mathematician under the age of 40. (Epilogue I)
They come out of the dark forest as if spawned by the night itself; the trees sending out their new kind of children. (Epilogue II)
Quotations
Because I saw the kind of lives they led: going to bed on an empty stomach for over half the year; frowned in debt without any hope of ever surfacing; their unborn generations bonded to service those debts; their blood sucked dry (talking of which, the Bengali word for 'sucking' and 'exploitation' is the same, have you ever noticed?); their children bony but with swollen bellies, arms and legs like reeds, hair bleached to brown with malnutrition; their lives shrivelled by worry. Because their lives were like this, I thought they would be simmering with anger and all we needed to do was a bit of stoking and there would be a giant conflagration that would bring down the blood-suckers and burn them to cinders. How hopeful it all seemed.
Then that hopefulness curdled: what I hadn't reckoned with was that decades and decades of this slow-burning flame of resentment and deprivation had burned them, not the perpretators. The embers of anger we had thought of fanning had burned down into the ashes of despair. They were already dead within their lives. They had no hope, no sense of a future, just an endless playing out of this illness of the present tense until its culmination in an early death.
It is true that rural people eat a lot of rice, but not for the reasons she had assumed. They eat rice because there isn't much else to eat: the vegetables they grow; the roots and leaves they forage; the occasional fish from the ponds and canals; the even rarer duck, which sometimes appears on the flooded rice fields during the early part of the growing season. But that is the ideal, almost aspired-for, scenario. The truth is more naked: they eat so much rice because they are filling themselves up against the time they know will come when they won't even have this staple to fill their stomachs.
Last words
His insides burn numb and he thrashes and writhes like a speared earthworm, thrashes and writhes, a pink foam emerging from his mouth, until he too is returned from the nothing in his life to nothing. (Prologue)
In three hours, well before dawn breaks, the Ajmer-Kolkata Express, carrying approximately 1,500 people, is going to hurtle down these tracks. (Epilogue II)
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.
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2014 Booker Prize longlist: The Lives of Others
Wikipedia in English (1)
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