A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry 1995 Giller Prize Winner

I first read A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry in 2002, so I shouldn’t have been surprised when I saw how big it was when I picked it up at the library. But I was. It is a saga of 748 pages.  When I read it in 2002, I wrote the following in my Book Diary: Well written, a marvelous picture of corruption and class/caste in India 1970-80's. Overwhelming at times. I cried at the end! So, what did I think of it this time? It is a wonderful, well-written book. Perhaps because I have read a couple of non-fiction books that describe life in Mumbai and Calcutta, I did not find it as overwhelming this time. While I didn't cry at the end, I did have a lump in my throat.

A Fine Balance has four main characters: Dina Dalal, a Parsi widow; Ishvar and his nephew Omprakash (Om), tailors; Maneck Kohlah, a student from a hill station in the Himalayas and son of one of Dina’s school friends.They come together at Dina’s home when Ishvar and Om are seeking jobs as tailors and Maneck arrives to board with her while he is studying in the city. From this beginning, during "The State of Internal Emergency" in the mid-70's, we slowly learn each protagonist’s past.

Their stories begin before Independence and continue to the time we meet them at Dina's flat. Ishvar and Om were born in a small village, into a caste of leather workers considered untouchables. Ishvar's father decides to send his sons to a nearby town to learn to be tailors to break this cycle. For a time it seems the family has managed to build new lives for themselves, but soon caste violence shatters their reality. Leaving only Ishvar and his nephew Om who head to the city to find work.

Dina overcame her brother's objections to marry the man of her choice, only to be left a widow after three years. Following her husband's death she lives with her brother's family, but finally returns to her flat to live her own life.

Maneck feels uprooted and pushed out by his parents who want him to get an education in the city. Conditions in the student dorms and the politics on campus are very unsettling for him.

For all of these characters it seems that they just can't get ahead. Every time they make progress with happiness and security, some thing or some one disrupts that progress. Sometimes you do just want to say...ah, come on....give them a break!  The first time I read this book, there was an event at a Vasectomy Clinic near the end of the book that caused me to yell, out loud..."No...you can't do this to him!" You do find yourself wondering if so many bad things could happen to one person.  Putting that feeling aside, it is a wonderful saga that made me consider why some people can triumph over adversity and others can't. It is enthralling while you are reading it, and leaves you with much to think about when you finish.

The book is also filled with a wonderful array of other characters including: Rajaram, the hair collector; Shankar the legless beggar;  Beggarmaster, who can be a great ally or a terrible enemy; and so many more. They all add to the richness of the story. 

The first time I read it I didn’t really pay any attention to the quotation at the front of the book. This time I noted the appropriateness.

Holding this book in your hand, sinking back in your soft armchair, you will say to yourself: perhaps it will amuse me. And after you have read this story of great misfortunes, you will no doubt dine well, blaming the author for your own insensitivity, accusing him of wild exaggeration and flights of fancy. But rest assured: this tragedy is not a fiction. All is true.  Honoré de Balzac, Le Pére Goriot

When I am reading books, I often encounter words that I don't know. But in this book I found it annoying because it disrupted the flow of my reading. I thought the words were strange. Here are a few examples: sortilegious serpent; made his skin horripilate; were triturated with food. 

I really liked some of his phrasing:
- "Unused for years, the lipstick poked up its head reluctantly as she rotated the base. She made a false start and smudged the lip line, but the labial acrobatics soon came back to her, the pursing and puckering and tautening, the simian contortions that seemed so absurd in the mirror."
- "For politicians passing laws is like passing water. It all ends up down the drain."
- "What an unreliable thing is time - when I want it to fly, the hours stick to me like glue.  And what a changeable thing, too. Time is the twine to tie our lives into parcels of years and months. Or a rubber band stretched to suit our fancy. Time can be the pretty ribbon in a little girl's hair. Or the lines in your face, stealing your youthful colour and your hair.....but in the end, time is a noose around the neck, strangling slowly."  

I have read three books by Rohinton Mistry: A Fine Balance, Such A Long Journey and Family Matters. My favourite of the three is Family Matters.

 NEXT: 1996 - Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood

The Book of Secrets by M G Vassanji - 1994 Giller Prize Winner

When I decided to write this blog, I thought it would be easy. After all, I always have opinions about the books I read. I soon found out it is not as easy I thought it would be. I have to tell a little about the book, and give reasons for my opinions. And it should be clear and concise and make sense. I found this especially difficult for The Book of Secrets which changes point of view, travels from location to location, and moves from 1988 to 1913 and back, with various stops at the years in between.

The book begins in 1988 in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Retired schoolteacher Pius Fernandes meets a former student who asks him to take on the project of recording and researching the contents of an old diary found in the back room of his shop. It was written in 1913 by a young British Colonial Administrator, Alfred Corbin. Pius becomes immersed in the story he is transcribing. I did not find it easy to become immersed in the story. I kept putting it down, and until the second half, felt no urgency to pick it up again! 

As Pius begins the process of trying to understand the unwritten story between the lines in the diary, he embarks on a journey that takes him from the beginning of Indian settlements in British East Africa to a post-colonial, independent Tanzania. Please take a look at the plot outline on Wikipedia. It presents the basic story of the novel and I see no reason to try to duplicate it myself.

In the Epilogue our narrator, Pius Fernandez, in describing what he had discovered and recorded about the lives of the people he encountered through the diary, calls his research: “…what I have come to think of as a new book of secrets. A book as incomplete as the old one was, incomplete as any book must be. A book of half lives, partial truths, conjecture, interpretation, and perhaps even some mistakes. What better homage to the past than to acknowledge it thus, rescue it and recreate it, without presumption of judgement, and as honestly, though perhaps as incompletely as we know ourselves, as part of the life of which we all are a part?” 

I think this is a very good description of The Book of Secrets itself. Some of the stories are incomplete, we never know the truth about some events, we have to interpret what we know and wonder what really happened. I appreciate the ambiguity.  While I was not immediately enthralled with the book, by the end I had come to enjoy it. There are many things to like about the book, including the fact that Mr Vassanji is a good writer.

• It had beautiful writing and lovely descriptive phrases. He brilliantly captures how young Muslim men and women can relate in their protective society: "To joke with a girl is to become intimate - to embrace and cuddle with words when bodies and even looks cannot but remain restrained, hidden. Joking, you can be a child, a brother, a lover. As a lover you embarrass, cause her to shift her eyes, to lose control in a peal of laughter and then stop, blushing as if kissed."
• He included a great Glossary at the end which explained the many African and Indian words and phrases that were used in the book. Usually they were explained in context, but it helped to have this resource when things were not quite clear.
• I liked the comparison of the characters Rita and Ali to Hollywood actress Rita Hayworth and Ali Khan, playboy son of the Aga Khan - and how people in their community saw them in these roles. It also showed how the community's view affected their view of themselves. In some ways they had to live up to these roles.
•  Fernandez writes to a scholar in Toronto to try to get more information about Corbin. This scholar writes that he had given a talk titled " What is not observed does not exist." - a thought provoking title.  I couldn't help thinking how this applies to our world where everything is observed and commented upon via Twitter, blogs, Instagram etc.
• I learned more about the Indian community in East Africa and how those individuals thought of themselves and how they fit into Africa. He describes what it was like for them as colonialism ended and their world changed forever.
  
  
  I would have liked a map included in the book; to show East Africa in the colonial period and then after independence. I wanted to be able to see where Mount Kilimanjaro was located in relation to Dar and the relationship between the other cities and towns mentioned (without having to go and look it up elsewhere). 
  
  
  There was an emotional barrier between the narrator, Pius Fernandez, and the reader. But I decided that this was intentional because Pius was not in touch with his own feelings. He hid from himself in many ways, so he was hidden from the reader as well.
  
  
  Would I recommend The Book of Secrets to other readers? Mr Vassanji also won The Giller Prize in 2003 for his book The In-Between World of Vikram Lall. I read that book and remember liking it much more than this book.  I think I will wait until I re-read that book and make my recommendation then. 
  
  
  If you have read this book, please share your opinions. If you are going to read it now, please come back and post your comments.
  
  
  NEXT: 1995 - A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  

Why Geller On Giller?

I am a reader. I will happily go anywhere that Ian McEwan or Margaret Atwood want to take me. I can suspend disbelief and join Ender’s Game or visit the world of The Company.  I enjoy spending time with a shopaholic or a dark and deeply flawed detective (whether American, Scandinavian or Scottish). 

I also like to have little reading projects. They are usually sparked by something I am reading….like my “Congo” project. I was reading The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver and that led to King Leopold’s Ghost and then The Heart of Darkness.  My “J.D. Salinger” project started when I read his daughter Margaret A. Salinger’s memoir, Dream Catcher.  I re-read all his books and stories that I had read as a high school and university student. Then I read a memoir by his former lover Joyce Maynard (daughter of Canadian writer Fredelle Maynard), A Place in the World. 

Sometimes the project has been sparked by a movie or a TV show. I saw the movie Capote starring Philip Seymour Hoffman and I had to re-read In Cold Blood and then everything I could find in print by Truman Capote. 

In 2007 I was reading a Man Booker Prize winning book and I thought that I would like to read all the Man Booker Prize Winners. So in no particular order, thrown in among my other reading, I tackled the list. I did not re-read any winners that I had already read. Shortly before I finished this project in June of 2012, I was looking for information about one of the writers and found a blog with reviews of all the winners in chronological order. That encounter sparked the idea for this blog.

After I finished reading the Man Booker winners, I wondered what my next project would be. The Nobel winners?  Lord NO! Have you seen that list? Who are some of those people? Would I even be able to find translations of some of the authors? That just seemed like WORK, not FUN.

The Pulitzers? A possibility. But then I thought, hey, I am Canadian. I should read The Giller winners or the Governor General’s Literary Awards. After thinking it over, I have decided to read all the Giller Prize winners in chronological order….or as it is now known, The Scotiabank Giller Prize. But this time instead of keeping my opinions on the pages of my reading journal, I am going to send them out into the “blogosphere.”  I know this is not an original idea, but it gives me something to do in my spare time.

I will re-read any of the winners that I have already read and compare my reactions to what I thought the first time around. Thanks to KEM for the suggestion that I call the blog Geller on Giller. 

My next post will be my thoughts about The Book of Secrets by M.G. Vassanji, the first Giller Prize winner in 1994. I just finished reading it, and I am looking forward to talking about this book. Expect this post in about two or three days.
 

I will try to post a new book every 3-4 weeks. I will be getting all my books from the Winnipeg Public Library (either as an e-book or a hard cover). If I encounter a book with a waiting list, it may mean that I won't be able to keep to this schedule. 

Geller on Giller: one reader’s view of the Scotiabank Giller Prize winning books.