Indian winter

Week 37: A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mishtry
Recommended by: Holly Vitow

With post-colonial literature, I'm not massively well read but I've read bits and pieces, mostly from Africa and the Indian subcontinent. Of that which I've read, I've vastly preferred the African experience. Indeed, I can't remember an Indian novel that I've truly liked, and that includes Booker Prize winners from Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy, Kiran Desai and Aravind Adiga. (Sidenote: another ongoing reading challenge was to read all of the Booker winners, something I'm on top of and personal taste being what it is, some have been exceptional, others have done nothing for me.) Anyway, this one has been on my list since right at the start of the year and my first request for recommendations and, if truth be told, it's one I'd been putting off for the above reasons. All I can say is more fool me.

I was wrong on this one. Very, very wrong. Because A Fine Balance was a fantastic book. It was finally the post-colonial Indian novel I've been looking for . Epic in scale, small in detail, it's a Dickensian (a good thing) portrait of four characters brought together during the state of emergency in the 1970s, a period of authoritarian rule and the curbing of civil liberties. Mishtry gets under the skin of the characters, bringing them, their worlds, and India itself to life with consummate skill.

Dina, Ishvar, Omprakesh and Manek come from diverse backgrounds, all have their own troubles but they are brought together through economic circumstance and start to forge complex relationships in this harsh and unforgiving period. The reader is taken on an emotional journey as we see caste, gender and politics all come in to play throughout the intertwining narratives. It is a brutal world as well, yet the characters come to rely on each other in spite of their individual hardships.

I don't think it's giving away much to say that this is no fairy tale. And perhaps that also contributed as it was a step away from magical realism, which is also something I've never really enjoyed. Instead it is simply grounded in realism, the only magic being that it is exceptionally written and with three-dimensional characters that I came to care deeply about. It is an affecting and affectionate novel, offering compassion to its protagonists and criticism of elements and society, especially the government, the way only art can. Quite simply one of the best books I've read this year.