Product Description

With a compassionate realism and narrative sweep that recall the work of Charles Dickens, this magnificent novel captures all the cruelty and corruption, dignity and heroism, of India. The time is 1975. The place is an unnamed city by the sea. The government has just declared a State of Emergency, in whose upheavals four strangers--a spirited widow, a young student uprooted from his idyllic hill station, and two tailors who have fled the caste violence of their native village--will be thrust together, forced to share one cramped apartment and an uncertain future.

As the characters move from distrust to friendship and from friendship to love, A Fine Balance creates an enduring panorama of the human spirit in an inhuman state.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2739 in Books
• Published on: 2001-11-30
• Released on: 2001-11-30
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 624 pages

From AudioFile
Set in 1970s India, this engrossing story captures the brutal social policies of Indira Gandhi's government, illustrating their often tragic effects on the lives of four central characters. The abridged narration of this novel, a Booker Prize finalist, is skillfully handled by Madhur Jaffrey. Jaffrey's straightforward style of reading--sympathetic but not sentimental--serves the material well: So much sorrow befalls the story's likable characters that an overly absorbed narrator could easily tip its "fine balance" from hope to inconsolable despair. Through subtle shifts in tone and accent, Jaffrey conveys a wealth of information about different characters' personalities and stations in life. An outstanding performance. J.C.G. © AudioFile 2002, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine

From Kirkus Reviews
From the Toronto-based Mistry (Such a Long Journey, 1991), a splendid tale of contemporary India that, in chronicling the sufferings of outcasts and innocents trying to survive in the ``State of Internal Emergency'' of the 1970s, grapples with the great question of how to live in the face of death and despair. Though Mistry is too fine a writer to indulge in polemics, this second novel is also a quietly passionate indictment of a corrupt and ineluctably cruel society. India under Indira Gandhi has become a country ruled by thugs who maim and kill for money and power. The four protagonists (all victims of the times) are: Dina, 40-ish, poor and widowed after only three years of marriage; Maneck, the son of an old school friend of Dina's; and two tailors, Ishvar and his nephew Om, members of the Untouchable caste. For a few months, this unlikely quartet share a tranquil happiness in a nameless city--a city of squalid streets teeming with beggars, where politicians, in the name of progress, abuse the poor and the powerless. Dina, whose dreams of attending college ended when her father died, is now trying to support herself with seamstress work; Maneck, a tenderhearted boy, has been sent to college because the family business is failing; and the two tailors find work with Dina. Though the four survive encounters with various thugs and are saved from disaster by a quirky character known as the Beggarmaster, the times are not propitious for happiness. On a visit back home, Om and Ishvar are forcibly sterilized; Maneck, devastated by the murder of an activist classmate, goes abroad. But Dina and the tailors, who have learned ``to maintain a fine balance between hope and despair,'' keep going. A sweeping story, in a thoroughly Indian setting, that combines Dickens's vivid sympathy for the poor with Solzhenitsyn's controlled outrage, celebrating both the resilience of the human spirit and the searing heartbreak of failed dreams. -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Review
"Astonishing. . . . A rich and varied spectacle, full of wisdom and laughter and the touches of the unexpectedly familiar through which literature illuminates life." --Wall Street Journal

"A serious and important work . . . the product of high intelligence and passionate conviction." --New York Review of Books

"Monumental. . . . Few have caught the real sorrow and inexplicable strength of India, the unaccountable crookedness and sweetness, as well as Mistry." --Pico Iyer, Time

"Those who continue to harp on the decline of the novel . . . ought to consider Rohinton Mistry. He needs no infusion of magic realism to vivify the real. The real world, through his eyes, is magical." --The New York Times -- Review

... Mistry needs no infusions of magical realism to vivify the real. The real world, through his eyes, is quite magical enough. -- The New York Times Book Review, A.G. Mojtabai

The five main characters of A Fine Balance, converging 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. Their struggles hold our attention through the first half of the novel, where Mistry succeeds in balancing his desire to create a moving tragedy with his strong impulse toward political and social commentary. A penchant for heavy-handed sentimentality, though, eventually overwhelms the attempt at tragedy, while social insight gives way a predictable survey of the evils threatening India. A Fine Balance is finally neither poignant nor pointed enough to fulfill Mistry's ambitions or the reader's expectations.
Copyright © 1996, Boston Review. All rights reserved. -- From The Boston Review

Customer Reviews

Murphy's Law
This book is the epitome of Murphy's Law- what can go wrong, will go wrong. It is so needlessly depressing. I am not one to only read books that are filled with sunshine and rainbows, but like many other reviewers have said, the problems faced by the characters in this book are SO numerous that as I read it, I became jaded. This book exhausted and numbed me and towards the end, the misfortunes of the characters had no affect on me.
I do feel like the author stereotyped India and Indian citizens to some degree. I feel like non Indians or non South Asians who read this book will walk away with an image of India that is not particularly accurate.
While his writing style is quite good, it gets a bit claustrophobic. Overall, the depression just makes it unbelievable. I did not enjoy this book at all.

Disappointing characters
I don't like it when books rely on anthropological details to provide interest -- just the different customs of a place (India) and the constraints placed on characters' lives is not enough to make a book interesting, imo. I need to really see inside the characters and see how their lives and growth are informed and constrained by what their situations provide and do not provide, and I didn't feel this here. These characters were not much better than types to me, the penny-pinching small business owner, e.g.

Brilliant
From its first page to its last, AFB is a marvel. RH paints a world in meticulous and breath-taking detail. Even at 600 pages, not one sentence of this novel is superfluous. AFB reads quickly and absorbingly. But it is no easy read: the stuff of this novel is the stuff of tragedies, great and small, and often unimaginable. I have no doubt of the realism, the 'authenticity', of the story RH tells. If I emerged scathed and scarred from reading it, I also emerged the wiser. No novel has so deeply immersed me in another culture and in other lives as this one did. I cannot begin to do it justice in a brief review.