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  • A Fine Balance See large image

    A Fine Balance (Oprah's Book Club (Paperback)) (Paperback) By (author) Mistry Rohinton

    05

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    Short Description for A Fine BalanceThe eagerly awaited novel from the author of the award-winning Such a Long Journey is set in India in the mid-1970s. A "State of Internal Emergency" has been declared, and in the days of bleakness and hope that follow, four disparate people find their lives becoming unexpectedly and inextricably entwined.
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    A modern classic5

    Michael Johnston Last night, I finished a remarkable book. I would go as far as to say that it can be compared with Tolstoy's Anna Karenina or even his War and Peace. In the final pages of A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry, one of the main characters does step in front of an express train. The reason for my comparisons and my positive feelings about this book are not, however, simply that coincidence but the fact that it takes the lives of a number of individuals in and around Delhi from 1947 to 1984 and interweaves them in great detail as they are affected and react to the historical changes that rent India over those years. The language is very much Indian English, even occasionally Hindi, but written with the insight of a poet. It is a modern Indian tragedy leavened with humour but not filtered through any layers of sentimentality. It is stark, revealing and frighteningly gory in its depiction of the caste system, the Partition troubles, the daily grind of living in the city and up in the hill stations, the excesses of Mrs Gandhi's Emergency and her assassination. The lives described are hardly those of the privileged or successful but start at the lowest levels with the Untouchables and the beggars whose lives are seemingly both predestined and somehow destined not to improve. I feel both purged and privileged to have read it. by Michael Johnston

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