Product Description

Rohinton Mistry’s enthralling novel is at once a domestic drama and an intently observed portrait of present-day Bombay in all its vitality and corruption. At the age of seventy-nine, Nariman Vakeel, already suffering from Parkinson’s disease, breaks an ankle and finds himself wholly dependent on his family. His step-children, Coomy and Jal, have a spacious apartment (in the inaptly named Chateau Felicity), but are too squeamish and resentful to tend to his physical needs.

Nariman must now turn to his younger daughter, Roxana, her husband, Yezad, and their two sons, who share a small, crowded home. Their decision will test not only their material resources but, in surprising ways, all their tolerance, compassion, integrity, and faith. Sweeping and intimate, tragic and mirthful, Family Matters is a work of enormous emotional power.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #201409 in Books
• Published on: 2003-11-18
• Released on: 2003-11-18
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 448 pages

Amazon.com Review
Set during the 1990s in an overcrowded and politically corrupt Bombay, Rohinton Mistry's Family Matters depicts a family being torn apart by lies, love, and its unresolved demons of the past. Nariman Vakeel is an aging patriarch whose advancing Parkinson's disease and its related complications threaten to destroy his large Parsi family. When Nariman breaks his ankle and becomes bedridden, his two stepchildren turn his care over to their half-sister, Roxanne, who lives in a two-room flat with her husband and two sons. What follows is each character's reaction to this situation, from Roxanne's husband's struggle to provide for his family without neglecting his conscience to their sons' coming of age in an era of uncertainty. Expertly interspersed between these dilemmas are Nariman's tortured remembrances of a forbidden love and its inescapable consequences ("no matter where you go in the world, there is only one story: of youth, and loss, and yearning for redemption. So we tell the same story, over and over. Just the details are different").

Family Matters is a compelling, emotional, and persuasive testimony to the importance of memories in every family's history. In a poetic style rich with detail, Mistry creates a world where fate dances with free will, and the results are often more familiar than anyone would ever care to admit. --Gisele Toueg

From Publishers Weekly
Warm, humane, tender and bittersweet are not the words one would expect to describe a novel that portrays a society where the government is corrupt, the standard of living is barely above poverty level and religious, ethnic and class divisions poison the community. Yet Mistrys compassionate eye and his ability to focus on the small decencies that maintain civilization, preserve the family unit and even lead to happiness attest to his masterly skill as a writer who makes sense of the world by using laughter, as one of his characters observes. Bombay in the mid-1990s, a once-elegant city in the process of deterioration, is mirrored in the physical situation of elderly retired professor Nariman Vakeel, whose body is succumbing to the progressive debilitation of Parkinsons disease. Narimans apartment, which he shares with his two resentful, middle-aged stepchildren, is also in terrible disrepair. But when an accident forces him to recuperate in the tortuously crowded apartment that barely accommodates his daughter Roxana, her husband and two young boys, family tensions are exacerbated and the limits of responsibility and obligation are explored with a full measure of anguish. In the ensuing situation, everyones behavior deteriorates, and the affecting secret of Narimans thwarted lifetime love affair provides a haunting leitmotif. Light moments of domestic interaction, a series of ridiculous comic situations, ironic juxtapositions and tenderly observed human eccentricities provide humorous relief, as the author of A Fine Balance again explores the tightrope act that constitutes life on this planet. Mistry is not just a fiction writer; he's a philosopher who finds meaning-indeed, perhaps a divine plan in small human interactions. This beautifully paced, elegantly expressed novel is notable for the breadth of its vision as well as its immensely appealing characters and enticing plot.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Yes, family does matter, but Nariman's is falling apart even as he himself crumbles from Parkinson's. The award-winning Mistry revisits Bombay in his latest work, which is slated for a 75,000-copy first printing.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Customer Reviews

"No matter where you go, there is only one important story."
As Mistry makes clear in this novel, the "one important story [is] of youth, and loss, and yearning for redemption...Just the details are different." With these themes as the bedrock of his story, he depicts the world of a multigenerational Parsi family in Bombay, their world changed forever when Nariman Vakeel, a 79-year-old former professor and sufferer from Parkinson's disease, falls and breaks his leg, effectively ending any possibility of an independent life. His stepchildren, Coomy and Jal, quickly dump Nariman in the two-room apartment of their younger half-sister, Roxana Chenoy, her husband Yezad, and two sons, supposedly for only three weeks, while his leg heals. Beset with financial problems, lack of space, and resentment of Coomy and Jal, who remain in their father's 7-room apartment, the family does its best, but tensions rise and slowly erode their relationships, precipitating intense personal crises for each family member.

Concentrating more on the world writ small than on the broader, more expansive views of A Fine Balance, Mistry creates a number of vibrant and fully drawn characters. Nariman Vakeel, recalling his dreams and disappointments, his 11-year love for Lucy Braganza, and his disastrous arranged marriage, is touching in his neediness and in his apologetic helplessness. His grandchildren delight in his stories and seek ways to help out; Roxana makes do in every way possible, tending to Nariman's most personal needs; and Yezad, frustrated by the lack of financial support from Coomy and Jal and a job in which he is underpaid, feels jealous of the old man's claims on Roxana. Mistry's dialogue, the subtle and not-so-subtle undercurrents it reflects, the often humorous interactions, the honest but naïve motivations of some of the characters, and the meticulously depicted and subtle decline of the family are the work of a master.

The one jarring note for me was the use of Shiv Sena, a fanatic political/religious group, as a motif thoughout the novel, their threats, extortion, violence, and fundamentalist rhetoric intruding periodically (and often dramatically) on the lives of the characters. While this obviously broadens the scope of the novel and offers a context in which to evaluate Coomy's religiosity, the fears of small businessmen like Yezad and his boss, and Yezad's eventual conflicts with one of his sons, it felt contrived to me, too strong and too obvious in what is otherwise a novel of more subtle interactions. Mary Whipple

A flawless gem
Mistry's latest novel, Family Matters, is a flawless gem and is a worthy successor to his equally impressive A Fine Balance. At the heart of Family Matters is the aging Nariman Vakeel who is in rapidly deteroriating health due to Parkinson's. Nariman is haunted by dreams of his ex-girlfriend, Lucy Braganza, a girl his parents forced him to renounce. He is cared for by his children Coomy and Jal. Coomy is a cranky woman with "too much anger" within her to care for her father well. When Nariman slips and hurts himself seriously on a walk, Coomy and Jal transfer custody of their bedridden father to their half-sister, Roxana Chenoy. Roxana's is a happy family with a doting husband, Yezad, and two wonderful sons, Murad and Jehangir. The arrival of Nariman in an already cramped apartment, though, puts enormous financial and emotional burdens on the family. As Nariman puts it, "People have their own lives, it's not helpful when something disturbs those lives." Family Matters portrays the daily play of emotions with remarkable acuity.

Mistry paints all of his characters very realistically with real strengths and failings. Roxana cares for her aging father with amazing grace. Yezad, who once dreamt of emigrating to Canada, tries valiantly to keep the cheer. And who wouldn't want to have Murad and Jehangir, two of the most amazing kids, as their own! There are many side players in the story-Daisy, who lives downstairs in Pleasant Villa, and who regales Nariman quite often with her violin. Also portrayed well is Mr. Vikram Kapur, Yezad's boss at Bombay Sporting Goods Emporium.

Mistry's love for his old city, Bombay, shines through loud and clear in the words of Mr. Kapur: "Bombay endures because it gives and it receives. Within this warp and weft is woven the special texture of its social fabric, the spirit of tolerance, acceptance, generosity. Anywhere else in the world, in those so-called civilized places like England and America, such terrible conditions would lead to revolution."

These words of high praise for Bombay, however, come with a warning against the radical political party, Shiv Sena, trying to gain control of the dynamic city. As with Fine Balance, Mistry uses his platform to make a couple of political statements-a frequent rant against the Shiv Sena and another subtle one against the pro-lifers in America, the "empty talkers" who prevent research into Parkinson's.

Mistry warns against fatalism: "In a culture where destiny is embraced as the paramount force, we are all puppets." Despite that, his primary characters often accept fate as the only graceful alternative. Family Matters ends without strong closure and that is just as well. For we have learnt along the way that even in a culture riddled with fatalists, the common man holds his head up high and always emerges from battle, relatively unscathed.

At one point in the narrative, Yezad and his boss peer into a mirror and Mr.Kapur asks, "See that? The faces of ordinary family men, not heroes." I respectfully beg to differ.

Family Obligations Tug at Us First
Within Bombay's Towers of Silence, the Parsis expose their dead to hungry vultures-a practice as environmentally friendly as it is macabre. Ethnic Persians who had migrated to India, the Parsis have traditionally led Bombay's commercial class. And though they have become an endangered species due to stagnating birth rates and miscegenation, their Zoroastrianism has largely removed them from the constant squabbling of Bombay's Hindus and Muslims, which a decade ago erupted into carnage and fire.

Behind the riots was the Shiv Sena, a Hindu supremacist band of thugs, whose agenda includes abolishing Valentine's Day, razing mosques and, according to writer Rohinton Mistry, "subjecting innocent letters and postcards to incineration if the address reads Bombay instead of Mumbai." Such is the cultural and political backdrop of this exciting new novel by Mistry.

Any novel set in Bombay must be as vast as the city. Mistry's knowledge of its customs, locales and languages is encyclopedic, his cast of characters panoramic, and his portrayal of Indian attitudes spot on. Indians perceive the use of toilet paper as unhygienic; they often converse in trite proverbs, and their attitude toward the West is decidedly conflicted. So is their attitude toward India, a great country and a "hopeless" one. Indians writing in English are producing some of today's most inspiring and original fiction, and I strongly recommend this one.