by Rohinton Mistry
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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.
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Average Customer Review:
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
 Murphy's Law, 2008-10-05
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.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
Disappointing characters, 2008-09-17
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.
1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
 Brilliant, 2008-09-05
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.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
Tragedy, Tragedy, Tragedy, 2008-09-02
This book is so tragegic, it is depressing. One unspeakable tragedy follows another this entire book, where's the happiness? The happiness described in this book is when you are not enduring an unimaginable tragedy. You can not imagine how bad these characters lives are until you read this book. And you think, well now that they have all had such hardship and struggle, now there will be a little happiness, a little hope for things to come, NO- in this book, more tragedy. Although it is well written, with beautiful characters, it overwelms you with heartache, to the point where you can feel no more pain for these characters. You have no hope for them and your at a loss of how to feel when faced with more tragedy, to the point where I am numb from it. I wanted to finish this book to end the suffering of all of the characters.
7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
"A Fine Balance Between Hope and Despair", 2008-08-18
One of the most captivating of the books I've read this month, "A Fine Balance" brilliantly captures the essence of a poverty-stricken city within a politically unstable India of the 1970s. The story is set mostly during the two-year State of Emergency (comparable to martial law), which began in 1975 when protests against the government were used as an excuse for the prime minister to hold on to power. It centers on four individuals - Dina Dalal, a Parsi widow who's struggling to make ends meet; Manek Kohlah, a sensitive college student and Dina's boarder; Ishvar Mochi, a tailor of immense patience and perseverance; and Omprakash Mochi, Ishvar's nephew. Needing a dependable income, Dina takes in sewing and hires Ishvar and Om as tailors. Much of the novel is about the hardships of Ishvar and Om and their histories, as well as those of Dina's and Manek's. Most poignant are the interwoven events that created a "family" out of these disparate individuals.
The city where the four reside is unnamed throughout, but from descriptions can be assumed to be Mumbai (Bombay). Many references are also made to a nameless prime minister (a she), obviously Indira Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru's daughter who was PM from 1966 to 1977, and then again from 1980 to 1984 when she was assassinated. The reader quickly realizes that Mr. Mistry is highly critical of Mrs. Gandhi's government and policies.
Mr. Mistry's sweep is wide--the story encompasses tumultuous political times and periods of immense social upheavals, depicting a democracy that is "at the best of times...a seesaw between complete chaos and tolerable confusion." Each chapter incorporates these, adding much depth and realism to the story and its characters. There are many cultural issues and historical events that serve as backdrops, and some historical figures alluded to--the long outlawed and rigid caste system; the 1947 partition which created the separate republics of India and Pakistan; graft and corruption; forced sterilization; slums; forced slave labor; the Mahatma, Mohandas Gandhi; violence and discrimination against the lower caste chamaar (the untouchables); and grinding poverty just to name a few.
The suffering, misfortune and misery (to refer to the characters' experiences as challenges would be a gross understatement) depicted here are relentless and those averse to stories of insurmountable poverty and pain should best avoid this. Life as depicted in the unforgiving streets of Mumbai is "...but a sequence of accidents--a clanking chain of chance events...a string of choices, casual or deliberate, which add up to that one big calamity..." relieved only momentarily by humor and the brief visit of good luck. Mistry does not sugarcoat anything and as unpalatable as the facts of his native country in that time period were, they were what they were.
Curious if the characters' lives are somewhat exaggerated, I consulted a friend, a charming Hindu lady in her 70s and of the higher caste, kshatriya. Her recollections do lend credence to the suffering of the untouchables depicted here, but one thing is a curiosity to her. As a believer of Krishna, she insists that love and respect, at least during her youth in India, were above the dictates of caste. Evidently, the villains of Mr. Mistry's story are of differing opinion and the tailors whose never-ending rounds of ill fortune may very well have been composites of the countless poor and disenfranchised.
It's a magnificent novel, really, and its story is quite fascinating. It was my welcome companion for several evenings (it's a bit over 600 pages) and its characters became dramatic fixtures in this reading ritual. From the first page, they ceased to be merely figments of a writer's imagination, but rather real people whose lives I saw unfold and whose conversations I eavesdropped on. This is not just for someone whose interest is piqued by South Asian history, but also for those who see fiction as a means to better understand the human spirit and its capacity to endure. The author's use of a Balzac quote that refers to Le Père Goriot creates an association that is justifiable. "A Fine Balance," like Goriot, is a 'human comedy,' one of corruption and greed, the kind whose toll is too high by anyone's standard.
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