A Fine Balance

I finished this book a couple of days ago but have been unable to sit and write about it until now. I have to say that I could not put it down; I thoroughly enjoyed reading it and I was fascinated by its cast of characters. The setting of the scene, the descriptions of the cities and the villages was detailed and mesmerizing, and I learned a great deal about life in India during the "Emergency" during which the people suffered under Indira Ghandi's apparently inept attempts to bring some sort of order to an incredibly poor and overpopulated country with a corrupt system of government and an antiquated, cruel caste system. The atempted "cure" almost destroyed a nation that was already torn apart.The four main characters, Dina, the strong willed, hardened widow, Maneck, the sheltered young student who comes to live with her, Ishvar and Om, the tailors fleeing the horrible caste system of their village and hoping to build a new life, are well drawn and sympathetic. The array of supporting characters reveal a great deal about the best and worst that mankind is capable of: Beggars, innocents, con men, landlords, thugs, gangsters and revolutionaries. In the end, no one is perfect, and each person (and even animal!) must do his or her best to survive in a world that is seldom fair, often cruel, and never predictable. These people somehow go through their tumultuous lives with grace and courage, always seeking something to hope for, some reason to go on surviving, some future that is better than the dismal present. I could see the strength of the people and thought that Mistry did a wonderful job portraying a nation's anguish through the characters he created.Having said all that, and having enjoyed reading it as much as I did, I have to say that I was ultimately disappointed by this novel. It seemed like there was little redemption, or hope, for anyone and that every single bad thing that could happen to a poor person in India happened to these 4 characters personally. It was just too much, and in the end, the suffering inflicted on them was just too heavy handed for me as a reader to accept. There were also far too many incredible coincidences that seemed too often contrived. The writing was clean and well done, and the setting of the tale was incredibly well drawn. It just seemed as if Mistry were trying too hard to explain the beauty and pain that is his India. In seeking the balance between hope and despair, he found only despair. Characters either survived, or were destroyed, each in their own way, but the ending was totally unsatisfying for me and I felt that it weakened all that had gone before. That is ultimately why I have had such a hard time writing about this book. I wish I could have been able to say more that was positive about a novel that I sincerely enjoyed reading and about a work that is obviously well-received.Perhaps I am like the reader in the Balzac quote at the start of the book and I am blaming the author for my own "insensitivity, accusing him of wild exaggeration and flights of fancy." All is probably true, and I can tell that Mistry feels very deeply about his subject, but it seems to me that fiction should illuminate the truth in such a way as to make it seem more real, while at the same time illustrating the basic truths of existence. To merely drive the sad truth into the ground, without giving one's characters at least some feeble hope for redemption, seems like a sad and wasted effort.

A absolutely fantastic “historical Fiction “ of the lives of people in the “City by the Sea” on the West Coast of the subcontinent. . Published well over 25 years ago and written about 1975 during Indira Gandhi’s self made “Emergency”. Four protagonist and a wonderful ensemble of characters, bring a truly human story about a shameful time in the subcontinents history. Filled with misery , cruelty and struggle with hope unrewarded. Caste violence,forced sterilization ,work labor camps all the horrors of the “emergency” . Hope, friendship & even some empathy and even love cannot compare with the struggles of their lives . We lose track of our protagonists until the year 1984 the Epilogue of the novel (The year the historical villain of the novel is assassinated) we see what hope without hope can do. Wonderfully written, heart wrenching the city by the sea and the other characters will be with you for years. . A fine balance can never be found .Condition of book:It did fall apart in two days .That’s on the me Dealing with a third-party seller. I included a picture .I wasn’t going to send back a book that was only $5. It was supposed to be in very good condition.. I was able to read it , In piecesI wouldn’t use them if I could avoid it.

A FINE STORYSomewhere in the middle of A FINE BALANCE Rohanton Mistry reveals the meaning of his title: it refers to the balance, in life, between hope and despair. At the point where this revelation comes, I felt that the story was a long way from achieving this balance--there was far more despair happening, and precious little hope. By the novel's end, however, a balance of sorts is reached.The story centers on four main characters: Dina, a widowed seamstress struggling to live independent of her family; Maneck, a college student who rents a room in her house; and Omprakash (Om) and Ishvar, nephew and uncle respectively, who come to work for Dina as tailors. The canvas Mistry paints their stories on is vast, much bigger than four individual lives: like so many novels coming out of India in recent years, it begins with India's independence from Great Britain and subsequent Partition, and goes as far as the 1980s. Along the way numerous characters, from beggars to Brahmins, make appearances, and each has a rich life story to which the reader is privy. The picture that emerges is almost Candide-like in its portrayal of relentlessly difficult lives played out against a backdrop of gruesome violence, prejudice and oppression.Far and away the most intense of these stories is that of Om and Ishvar, descendants of the untouchable castes who, due to the sacrifices and ingenuity of their families, have climbed, against all odds, up the rickety caste ladder. For defying an ancient and cruel tradition, they and their families become the victims of almost unspeakable horrors.When Dina hires the tailors to sew in her small apartment, she tries to maintain professional distance in order to keep them in line as employees. As she gets to know their life stories, though, she softens, and eventually assumes the role of Om's mother and Ishvar's close friend. Maneck, her boarder and son of a childhood friend, also becomes like a son to her, as well as like a brother to Om. These four eventually live like a family in the fullest sense of the word.By focusing on a few individuals with a supporting cast of thousands, Mistry has produced a story as big as the Maharrabata. His writing style is flawless, elegant without being pretentious. He describes huge events, like a funeral procession for a popular legless beggar, with all the grandeur they're due, and subtler details, like Dina's inner conflicts, with unerring precision. This was a book I couldn't put down, yet never wanted to finish. It haunted my days while I read it, altered my perspective on my own life, and broadened my worldview. It's become one of the few books whose vision I'll carry around for the rest of my life.Dina is, perhaps unwillingly, the moral compass of the book: though she resists getting close to the others, she possesses an unfailing integrity that, at every step, prevents her from behaving with anything less than righteousness and generosity. Dina's life may disappoint her, but she accepts it with grace. Ishvar and Om, too, accept their circumstances with improbable grace, and through it all continue to love and care for one another. Only Maneck, whose life is easily the most privileged of the four, buckles under pressure.The ways in which these characters respond to their lives and each other provides the book with a moral of sorts. Mistry's proscription for achieving the balance between hope and despair is, without question, human connection. Salvation, he seems to be saying, lies in human loyalty, commitment and a willingness to care for one another.If one made an accounting of the good and bad events that occur in A FINE BALANCE, the despair side of the scale would undoubtedly weigh most heavily--but human connection is so powerful that its mere occurrence gives the other side so much weight that the scale comes to rest in a state of equilibrium.CODA: January 2017.Two months ago I re-read this book, and it was an ecstatic reading experience even the second time.

This novel is described as an epic, it is certainly sweeping and describes the interconnected lives of characters in post-Independence India. Most of the storyline is set during the time of the emergency laws of the mid-1970s and it wraps up shortly after the assassination of Indira Gandhi in 1984. The cast takes in Muslims and Hindus and Parsees, and it is set largely in Mumbai (the big “City on the Sea” in the novel is never named but it is clearly Mumbai).The book is long, but as with all well written books it soon took a grip with me and it repaid many hours of reading. It paints a pretty unromantic but very human picture of Indian life as lived by ordinary people with the concerns of juggling family duties and roles in traditional culture, forging a life for themselves in a big city and simply making ends meet. As well as a range of religious backgrounds, we also have women and untouchables as central characters. All swirl together with irreconcilable differences reemerging again and again. There is also a certain optimism that is developed and allowed to run as a theme and most clearly set out in the living arrangements between Dina (a Parsee widow who has a flat), Maneck, the son of her old school friend (and the closest the novel gets to a central character) who stays with her as a student, and the Uncle and Nephew pairing of the untouchable tailors Ishvar and Om who have come to the city to make money and return to their village. Over the course of the novel, this arrangement moves from one largely of necessity to genuine warmth and mutual affection. Maneck’s youthful idealism is a constant good influence on Dina as he stands up for Ishvar and Om and I think using Parsee characters to share living space with untouchables is a good device. Maneck’s idealism is slowly ground down by the seemingly endless injustices and coarseness of the life he sees around him, the full extent of his despair becoming apparent only towards the end of the book. Dina herself has lots on her plate being a widowed woman living in a flat under a precarious tenancy and with a brother constantly on her case to remarry but still striving to enjoy her independence. Ishvar and Om’s back story of changing their profession from leatherworkers (and hence untouchable) to tailors is really well done and it is of course they who really have the hardest lives by far. This little band grow together and make their lives surrounded by family members, rent collectors, beggars, quirky neighbours, bulldozed shantytowns, gangsters, corrupt policemen, crooked politicians, holy men and activist students. All against a background of a political emergency accompanied by almost total disregard for basic human rights or the rule of law with forced sterilisation into the bargain. The plot is full of twists and turns and draws well on the usual chaos of Indian day to day life as well as the political realities of the time.It’s a great book in its own right, engaging and well written, and as a bit of a sucker for all things Indian I really enjoyed it. It also felt like a very honest and realistic portrayal of the lives of many people in what is now the world’s most populous country. It conveys well the sheer scale of the life and the problems of the place, the immense contrast between life in a small country town and a mega city, the care people show towards neighbours when they are thrown together as well as the shocking brutality of poverty which exists on a scale that it is impossible to grasp if you haven’t been there.However, getting towards the end things do take a bit of a turn for the worse. Without putting in any spoilers, as you approach the end of the book and the happy household has dispersed I was expecting some sort of tying up of loose ends, the satisfactory conclusion that it felt I was being carried towards. It doesn’t happen: in what seems the space of just a few pages the individual stories are not brought together but reach very separate and rather abrupt and messy ends. In one sense this was I suppose in keeping with the rest of the book: who says real lives have happy endings? Why should loose ends be tied up? Why should the gang get back together for one last show before setting out again on well defined paths into the sunset? Nevertheless, the way it is done does have the feel of a writer who is in a hurry to end and is unsatisfying. There is an epilogue where we are taken forward perhaps six or seven years where the characters are (kind of) brought together after dispersing and seeing their lives go in different directions and suffering various mishaps (to put it mildly), but in a sense it didn’t really feel right. Dina and Maneck, whose nearly but never quite romantic relationship features so strongly earlier, meet without even sharing a meal. Maneck seems to have regressed rather than grown up and ignores Ishvar and Om who also it seems walk past him without saying hello. It didn’t quite stack up for me and left me with a feeling of deflation. Perhaps something like this was what the author was seeking to achieve, but I can’t help feeling that most of the book wasn’t written with this in mind. It felt like a conclusion thought of and executed in a hurry.The conclusion aside, I did really enjoy this book. With huge books like this I often find myself reading them more than once, but I’m not sure I would with this one, the ending really did detract from it and would colour any second reading.

A Fine BalanceBy Rohinton MistryA Fine Balance is well written and achingly evocative of the period, the second half of the twentieth century in India.Tailors, Ishvar Darji and his nephew Omprakash leave their village to escape poverty and seek their fortune in the city, hoping to return rich and successful and rescue their family from crushing poverty and prejudice.On their train journey they meet Maneck Kohlah, also on his way to the city but to study. Fate has brought them together and they find they are heading for the same place, Maneck to lodge with his mother’s old friend, Dina Dalal and the tailors to work for her.The story is told very definitely through the characters and the book is packed with well drawn, fascinating characters, convincing, often heartbreaking, always evocative but never over sentimental.A Fine Balance is not a quick read. The pace is steady, perhaps a bit pedantic at times but definitely worth the time it takes to read.It is a book to savour rather than to gallop through.I would certainly read more by this author.Sue Almond May 2018

The novel contains many stories woven together - it’s a web of many different characters lives and for that reason it’s so gripping and interesting. But I think the author over-uses tragic misfortunes and the ending especially is very dissatisfying. I’m open to reading misery memoires (this is like a multiple 3rd person behemoth of misery tales) but there has to be some, to use the title of the book, balance! It covers some Indian history and the atrocities committed very well though - so in one sense is noble. What happens to the four key characters at the very end does not seem in keeping with their character development and seems to be made to present one final tragedy in the catalogue of misfortunes. Ironically, the writer at several points discusses the kindness or fairness in dumping stories of misfortune on others through his characters thoughts and interactions - Ishtar decides not to tell the whole truth to his tailor mentor to spare him his pain on hearing it. Maneck also very gently fills Dina in on the tailors’ past traumas to help her feel compassion without experiencing horror/trauma too greatly. You would have thought an effective ending would therefore be actually a happy one - where we are left to wonder if our feelings are being spared or not. Still - the book left me with plenty of food for thought...

I have read a few Indian novels, and have thought them very good with White tiger being the best. However, this is the best of the lot and was written before those others.This is a devastating work covering what was occurring in India in two time periods (1950's and 1970's) and it focuses on how this affected the people of all different castes, religions and class.It is not a cheery novel, far from it and 'a fine island's derives from the balance between despair and hope as told by a character within the book who has a small but significant part to play. There is hope, but it struggles to maintain it's balance with despair and this is perfectly encapsulated in the ending.What really elevates this book is the fantastic writing. Despite it's subject, it has an easy going narrative which really helps the reader (well, me) bond with these characters and made me feel like I was there with them experiencing everything they did.Superb.

This is like "slumdog millionaire" except without the feelgood factor. Set in 1970s Bombay (Mumbai), although the city name is never explicitly mentioned. Depressing yet engrossing, the story follows the criss crossing lives of four characters in post partition India. Mistry describes the hardships of poverty in India and the prejudice and inequities of the caste system with brutal grit. A character in the book describes the "fine balance between hope and despair". Cruel and harrowing but compelling to the end.