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The time is 1975. The place is an unnamed Indian city by the sea. The government has just declared a State of Emergency. The days that follow bring new forms of degradation and misery to vie with resilience and stubborn hope in the daily lives of the people, four of whom are compelled by a housing shortage to share one cramped apartment. They are an unlikely quartet; Dina Dalal, a seamstress in her early forties and a widow for almost twenty years who, determined not to remarry or rely on her brother's grudging charity, has forged a fragile independence for herself. Maneck Kohlah, a student from a hill-station near the Himalayas, sadly, uprooted from his beloved home by his parents' well-intentioned desire that he attend college in the city. Ishvar Darji, an impossible optimist, and his recalcitrant teenage nephew, Omprakash, tailors who have fled a legacy of unfathomably brutal caste violence in their small inland village.
With no common background and only the most impersonal threads of common need, these four find their lives becoming unexpectedly but inextricably entwined, their growing trust, humor, and affectionate interdependence establishing a bulwark against the hardships and torturous machinations of daily life under the Emergency, holding them together, finally, for both better and worse.
Reaching back in time to trace their stories - from their individual pasts into their shared present - the novel moves through an extraordinarily volatile stretch of years, from the chaotic aftermath of the Partition in 1947 to the stage political rallies of the Emergency. Its broad narrative sweep takes us from the Pakistani border, with its vast expanses of mountain and valley, to the city, where the only vastness is in the number of people in the streets and alleyways, and in and out of the lives of an unforgettable community of characters: Rajaram, the hair-collector; Shankar, the legless beggar; Beggarmaster, teh dealer in human lives; Mr. Valmik, the proofreader allergic to printing in; Kesar, the police sergeant allergic to conventional notions of justice and law.
"Let me tell you a secret," Mr. Valmik says to Maneck. "There is no such thing as an uninteresting live." And, certainly, this is true of the lives that unfold across the pages of this luminous novel: lavish in sensual detail, rich in both political and emotional resonance. The work of a master storyteller, A Fine Balance gives us a deeply compassionate exploration - both moving and humorous - of the fragility and abiding strength of the human spirit put to extraordinary test.
(front flap)
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Subjects
literary fiction, historical fiction, castration, suicide, Fiction, India in fiction, City and town life in fiction, Apartment houses, Apartment houses in fiction, City and town life, History, Literature, Bevölkerung, Domestic fiction, Fiction, family life, Fiction, urban, India, fiction, Fiction, historical, English language, Large type books, Social life and customs, Manners and customs, Roman de l'Inde de langue anglaise, Fiction, urban & street lit, Fiction, historical, general, Historical, Literary, Sagas, City lifePeople
Dina Dalal, Maneck Kohlah, Ishvar, Omprakash, Nusswan, Rajaram, Beggarmaster, Potency Peddler, Shanti, Mr. Valmik, Farokh Kohlah, Prime Minister, Ashraf Chacha, Narayan, Thakur Dharamsi, Rustom Dalal, Ruby, Mrs Gupta, AvinashTimes
1947, 1975, 1984, The EmergencyShowing 10 featured editions. View all 33 editions?
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A Fine Balance
2002, Thorndike Press
Hardcover
in English
- U.S. large print edition
0786241969 9780786241965
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A fine Balance: a novel
2001 November, Alfred A. Knopf
Hardcover
in English
- First American Edition, Fourth Printing
0375414819 9780375414817
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Book Details
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Work Description
A Fine Balance is Rohinton Mistry's eagerly awaited second novel and follows his critically acclaimed Such a Long Journey, the book that won three prestigious literary awards in 1991.
Set in India in the mid-1970s, A Fine Balance is a richly textured novel which sweeps the reader up into its special world. Large in scope, the narrative focuses on four unlikely people who come together in a flat in the city soon after the government declares a "State of Internal Emergency." Through days of bleakness and hope, their lives become entwined in circumstances no one could have foreseen.
There is Dina Dalal, a widow who makes a difficult living as a seamstress, determined not to remarry or rely on her brother's charity; Maneck Kohlah, a student from a hillstation near the Himalays, uprooted from home by his parents' wish to send him to college in the city; and Ishvar and his nephew, Omprakash, tailors by trade, who fleeing caste violence, leave their village in the interiour to find employment. The narrative reaches back in time to follow the stories of these four people - the lives they began with, the places they left behind.
This stunning portrayal of a country undergoing change is alive with enduring images; a shopkeeper gazing out over a landscape, once-beloved, now transformed by the smoke of squatters' cooking fires; a helicopter bomarding a political rally with rose petals while the Prime Minister's son floats past in a hot-air balloon; men and women being transported in open trucks to a sterilization clinic; four people tenderly piecing together their history in the squares of a quilt.
Mistry gives us an unforgettable community of characters, among them; Nusswan, a successful businessman and Dina's tyrannical yet well-meaning older brother; Rajaram, the hair-collector, who befriends the two tailors; Beggarmaster, who wheels and deals in human lives; the Potency Peddler, who hawks his wares on market day; Shanti, the young woman who inhabits Omprakash's most heated fantasies; Mr. Valmik, a proofreader who weeps copiously due to an allergy to printing ink; Farokh Kohlah, Maneck's melancholy father, marooned in the past, less and less able to accept the world as it must be.
Mistry brilliantly evokes the novel's several locales, creating scenes of startling brutality as well as moments which inhabit the gentler, more intimate realm of people's lives. Written with compassion, humour and insight into the subtleties of character, the novel explores the abiding strength and fragility of the human spirit.
A Fine Balance confirms Rohinton Mistry's reputation as one of the most gifted fiction writers of today.
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October 8, 2021 | Edited by ImportBot | import existing book |
April 1, 2019 | Edited by Lisa | Added new cover |
January 22, 2019 | Edited by Lisa | Added new cover |
January 22, 2019 | Edited by Lisa | Edited without comment. |
May 29, 2009 | Created by ImportBot | Imported from Collingswood Public Library record |