![]() ![]() ![]() Politics and politicians play walk - on parts, and the injustices they perpetrate are merely one more failing of the human condition that is Mistry's real interest. Its concern is with the lives and aspirations of the powerless human beings who populate its pages. Every atrocity known to have been committed during the Emergency - from slum demolitions to forced sterilisation - occurs to Mistry's characters, so that they become a template for a stark and unsparing portrait of that time in India.īut A Fine Balance is not, at heart, a political novel. ![]() Like his first (the highly regarded Such a Long Journey), A Fine Balance - Mistry's second novel - is set in Indira Gandhi 's India, and more specifically during the Emergency, when the world's largest democracy spent 22 months as the world's largest banana republic. It is an astonishing work of suffering, death and degradation in contemporary India which nonetheless manages to leave grounds for hope amongst the many reasons for despair. If Rohinton Mistry weren't Canadian - and a Canadian who has won every literary prize his adoptive country has to offer - I would have called this a great Indian novel. ![]()
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