A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
(November 2007)

*****

This epic explores the effects of the state of emergency on the lives of ordinary people in 1970's India. It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize . Although Rohinton Mistry was living in Canada at that time, he wrote the book after returning to Bombay twenty years later. He had planned to write a short novel which began "with the image of a woman at a sweing machine ....As I began writing, though, the story grew, and I found myself getting interested in other details of the characters' lives". This aspect interested me in that he hadn't planned the story exactly but let it run with his imagination. It gives a great insight into Bombay and into village life in that era. He has been compared to Tolstoy and Dickens but explains that he was never particularly drawn to these authors, but prefered American writers like Cheever and Updike. The ending of the book, although not happy, is one of hope for a better future.

It tells the story of a seamstress who sets up in business after the death of her husband. As her eyes begin to fail, she recruits two tailors, Ishvar and Om, Ishvar's nephew. She then takes in a paying guest, a student named Maneck.

The story explores the lives of the characters that inhabit it and is extremely descriptive, with touches of wit.