5/24/2023 0 Comments A fine balance book review![]() ![]() ![]() The book starts with the coming together of four people whose stories make up the heart of the book. Fine, if you already have an in-depth knowledge of Indian politics of four decades ago, but unfortunately I don’t. I say ‘it would seem’ because again Mistry doesn’t really bother to tell us about the political situation – he implies his characters are too poor or disinterested to care about politics and, since we see only through their eyes, we get only a vague, fuzzy view of what’s going on. Mrs Ghandi is in power and ‘The Emergency’ has been declared – a period, it would seem, when the government was cracking down on opposition and civil liberties in general. ![]() The book is set in the period of the late ’70s/early ’80s, probably in Bombay, I think, though I don’t think Mistry ever actually says so. So this review is an attempt to explain why I struggled so badly with a book that apparently the whole world loves. ![]() I began the book on the 27th July and finally abandoned it on 1st September at just over the half-way mark. Shortlisted for the 1996 Booker prize, and recommended by just about everyone who’s read it, this book has accumulated 244 5-star reviews on Amazon UK, and only three 1-stars. ![]()
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