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A Fine Balance (Oprah's Book Club)
Average Customer Rating:  
List Price:
$15.95
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$10.85
Your Savings: $ 5.10 ( 32% )
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Manufacturer: Vintage
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9781400030651
ISBN: 140003065X
Label: Vintage
Manufacturer: Vintage
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 624
Publication Date: 2001-11-30
Publisher: Vintage
Release Date: 2001-11-30
Studio: Vintage
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Editorial Reviews:
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With a compassionate realism and narrative sweep that recall the work of Charles Dickens, this magnificent novel captures all the cruelty and corruption, dignity and heroism, of India. The time is 1975. The place is an unnamed city by the sea. The government has just declared a State of Emergency, in whose upheavals four strangers--a spirited widow, a young student uprooted from his idyllic hill station, and two tailors who have fled the caste violence of their native village--will be thrust together, forced to share one cramped apartment and an uncertain future.
As the characters move from distrust to friendship and from friendship to love, A Fine Balance creates an enduring panorama of the human spirit in an inhuman state.
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: Emotionally draining.
Comment: This book actually beat out The Jungle by Upton Sinclair as the most depressing book I've ever read. Although both stories contain equal amounts of death, disfigurements and hopelessness, this one does a better job of painting the characters as real people, and allows the reader to better identify with the various people in the book -- which in turn makes all the crap they suffer through seem even worse.
It's a story that covers various generations of people living in India up through the late 70's. It talks alot about forced sterilizations, all forms of corruption, and duty/tradition as it conflicts with modernization. If you're looking for a great big downer this would be a wonderful read to ruin your week. It's a great book, a tiny bit ham-fisted at times near the very end, but it's just depressing as all hell.
Customer Rating: 
Summary: Unbalanced - But Brilliantly So
Comment: I'll admit that I'm not typically drawn to books that make "Oprah's Book Club", so it was with some trepidation that I picked up Rohinton Mistry's "A Fine Balance". But I was pleasantly surprised to find this a remarkable achievement - an ambitious, bold, and unapologetic look under the covers of India in the mid-1970's. It is the epic tale of four lives - a feisty widow too proud to accept help from her wealthy brother, tan uncle/nephew tailor team who escape the brutal caste system come to the "city by the bay" (a very thinly ceiled Bombay) to earn a meager living, and a young college student from India's northern hills. During a government-declared state of emergency from 1975 - 1977, a period in which reason and common decency fall victim to corruption and cruelty, fate unites and bonds this unlikely quartet in a richly drawn but undeniably black study of character and culture, liberally spiced with mutilation and depravity, cast against a backdrop of poverty and despair unimaginable by Western standards. In a landscape of lowly untouchables and the hideously deformed legions ruled by the "beggermaster", of open air communal latrines and forced sterilization, Mistry's India is an almost surrealistic nightmare of tyranny and oppression.
But if there is a weakness in this sweeping novel, it is the rather ironic lack of balance - a story that sacrifices plot for social impact, that majors in extremes, applying more amperage the necessary to deliver the desired shock. It is unmistakably evident that the author is a huge critic of Indira Gandhi, and uses "A Fine Balance" as a platform to vent his political views, and as a result at times bogs down in unnecessary melodrama and hyperbole. Mistry's strong character development and massive scope of the novel is sufficient to absorb some unrestrained political bombast, but it would unfortunate for readers to assume that this is representative of India's highly fascinating, diverse and magical culture. And there lies the risk.
Notwithstanding, "A Fine Balance" is an important novel, a sprawling study of good people in bad places and the excesses of power dispensed without constraint. While not without humor, those looking for neatly wrapped packages brimming with redemption and justice and happy, smiling people rising against all odds will likely be disappointed.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Where is the balance?
Comment: I was throughly disappointed with this book and found that half through it the author abandoned the fundamental concept he himself introduced - the fine balance between hope and despair. Towards the end, the narration slips into the darkness, tragedy and ugliness of such concentration, that the brain refuses to accept it as realistically possible.
Customer Rating:
Summary: A Fine Balance
Comment: This was a great story. I took it as my main book on a two week vacation. I thought it would take me about that long to read it, because it is a large book. I got so involved with the characters, that I couldn't tear myself away. There are no incidental characters. I love the way the author weaves each person into the story so that when you meet them later they have evolved into an indispensable part. There was so much going on, that when I was asked what it was about, I had a hard time trying to retell it. There was just so much! If there was one thing I would change, it would be the ending. It caught me totally off guard and I am still trying to figure out WHY?
Customer Rating:
Summary: Compelling read - don't let its length put you off
Comment: A long book, and certainly not "light" reading, it's a book where the characters really get under your skin. I found myself reading this book with my breakfast before I went to work to find out what would happen. I was sorely disappointed by the characters' sad endings, but the humor and ultimate grace and humanity showed by the characters give some hope. It reminds us all of the unfathomable circumstances that many people's lives contain, and not just in faraway countries. Hightly recommended.
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