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A Fine Balance
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About the Book
As Christina Nunez wrote in Atlantic, “[Mistry] has long been recognized as one of the best Indian writers; he ought to be considered simply one of the best writers, Indian or otherwise, now alive.” Twice short-listed for England’s prestigious Booker Prize, Rohinton Mistry was broadly introduced to American readers when A Fine Balance was an Oprah Book Club selection in 2001.
Rohinton Mistry has not lived in his native India for many years; but like many expatriate writers, he continues a relationship with his country in his writings and has enriched his readers’ understanding of it. After emigrating to Toronto in 1975, Rohinton Mistry got a job as a bank clerk and ascended to the supervisor of customer service after a few years.
His dissatisfaction in the job led to his taking classes in English, first at York College, and ultimately pursuing a degree part-time at the University of Toronto.
Rohinton Mistry had no ambitions to be a writer until he got to Canada and began taking classes in literature at the University of Toronto. Encouraged by his wife, he set out to win a university literary contest by writing his first short story. He called in sick from work, devoted several days to the story, entered it, and won the contest.
A Fine Balance displays 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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