A Fine Balance
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Tuesday 25 May |
Introduction
‘This is a work of genius. I cannot begin to review it without saying so. It should be read by everyone who loves books, win every prize, make its author a millionaire.’ Literary Review
In a novel set during the turbulent years of Indira Gandhi’s ‘emergency’, Bombay-born Rohinton Mistry evokes wonderfully the quiet heroism of India’s urban poor. Combining as it does the spirit of Bombay with a distinctively English sensibility, Mistry’s third novel, the prize-winning A Fine Balance, has been described by the Guardian as ‘A masterpiece of illumination and grace. Like all great fiction, it transforms our understanding of life’.
Compared by critics to Dickens and Tolstoy, Bombay-born Mistry emigrated to Canada at the age of 23, and here set about writing ‘a story set in the city [of Bombay], but also a story about village life’. As well as the turmoil of the Emergency and chaotic government policy, the novel tackles the realities of the caste system and the ‘untouchables’, India’s colonial legacy, and the clash between urban and rural cultures.