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Amitav Ghosh | 246 pages | 25 Mar 2010 | Mariner Books | 9780618329960 | English | Boston, MA, United States The Shadow Lines Important Quotes | SuperSummary

Keep track of everything you watch; tell your friends. Full Cast and Crew. Release Dates. Official Sites. Company Credits. Technical Specs. Episode List. Plot Summary. Plot Keywords. Parents Guide. External Sites. User Reviews. User Ratings. External Reviews. Metacritic Reviews. Photo Gallery. Trailers and Videos. Crazy Credits. Alternate Versions. Rate This. Episode Guide. It may be his first day back on the job but he's soon Added to Watchlist. Top-Rated Episodes S1. Error: please try again. The Evolution of Armie Hammer. TV Series Done. Roket - Series. Netflix Mini series to be seen. Greatest TV Shows you didn't watch. Use the HTML below. You must be a registered user to use the IMDb rating plugin. Episodes Seasons. Edit Cast Series cast summary: Chiwetel Ejiofor Jonah Gabriel 7 episodes, Christopher Eccleston Joseph Bede 7 episodes, Kierston Wareing Lia Honey 7 episodes, Richard Lintern Patterson 7 episodes, Malcolm Storry Maurice Crace 7 episodes, Clare Calbraith Laura Gabriel 7 episodes, Stephen Rea He lives with his wife, the author Deborah Baker, in New York, and the couple has two children. Ghosh has taught literature at several colleges and universities, including Queens College and Harvard. In , he was named a Ford Foundation Art of Change Fellow, which is an award that recognizes artists and cultural leaders based in the US who demonstrate a commitment to social justice. Historical Context of The Shadow Lines Though the Partition of British is mostly a background event in The Shadow Lines , it is partially responsible for the conflicts that the narrator and his family experience over the course of the novel. Many European powers developed colonies and established trading relationships with India from its "discovery" in the fifteenth century onward. Great Britain gained control over most of the Indian subcontinent in the early nineteenth century, which led to it being known as British India or the British Raj. Indian people, however, began pushing for independence, especially in the early twentieth century. Great Britain promised India freedom in exchange for fighting for them in the two world wars, and Great Britain only followed through after the second. The Partition happened in August of , and though the British, Indian, and Pakistani governments took religion into account, the new borders created minorities of Muslims, Hindus, and Sikhs where there hadn't been before. This caused extreme violence, especially in the region of Punjab, which was split between West Pakistan and India. This religious animosity continued and still does to this day , and it's partly what led to the riots that the narrator and Tridib experience in in Calcutta and , which became the capital of East Pakistan. The riots began when an important religious relic—a lock of hair that is believed to be the Prophet Muhammad's—mysteriously disappeared from the Kashmir region of India. Though the relic had been respected by all three religions Hinduism, Sikhism, and Islam , adherents of each religion soon turned on each other in various cities in India and Pakistan, which resulted in extreme violence. 's The God of Small Things takes place in much the same time period as The Shadow Lines ss and is told in a similarly fragmented and nonlinear style. Khushwant Singh's Train to Pakistan is a historical novel that focuses on the human costs of the in Cite This Page. Home About Story Contact Help. LitCharts uses cookies to personalize our services. In part two, the Narrator focuses primarily on the political turmoil that will eventually engulf India and Pakistan in riots, and on the efforts of his grandmother to bring her uncle back to India from his home in the city of Dhaka. It is also revealed that Ila has entered into an unhappy marriage with Nick Price. As Ila flirts with bohemian idealism, Tridib falls deeper into melancholy as he pursues his own studies. But again, there is no sense that this will have a happy ending for either of them. At this point, the Narrator is forced to question the quality and truth of his own memories and those of everyone else. As he has written his chronicle, he has always been reliant on the stories of others. As the novel ends, he is in bed with May Price, who has begun to act as a mother figure—and possibly a lover —to him. It is unclear whether he will view his future with optimism, because what is real to him today will soon become an untrustworthy memory. The Shadow Lines received great acclaim, despite its challenging style. But read carefully, as a whole, the novel is an ingenious, occasionally frustrating nesting structure, much like memory itself. The Shadow Lines . Save Download. The Shadow Lines by Amitav Ghosh

All Themes Youth vs. LitCharts Teacher Editions. Teach your students to analyze literature like LitCharts does. Detailed explanations, analysis, and citation info for every important quote on LitCharts. The original text plus a side-by-side modern translation of every Shakespeare play. Sign Up. Already have an account? Sign in. From the creators of SparkNotes, something better. Sign In Sign Up. Literature Poetry Lit Terms Shakescleare. Download this LitChart! Teachers and parents! Struggling with distance learning? Themes All Themes. Symbols All Symbols. Theme Wheel. In-depth summary and analysis of every part of The Shadow Lines. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. This article may rely excessively on sources too closely associated with the subject , potentially preventing the article from being verifiable and neutral. Please help improve it by replacing them with more appropriate citations to reliable, independent, third-party sources. April Learn how and when to remove this template message. Sahitya Akademi , Official website. Works by Amitav Ghosh. for English. by R. Srinivasa Iyengar Ramanujan by Hidden categories: Webarchive template wayback links Articles lacking reliable references from April All articles lacking reliable references Use dmy dates from August Use Indian English from August All Wikipedia articles written in Indian English. As Ila flirts with bohemian idealism, Tridib falls deeper into melancholy as he pursues his own studies. But again, there is no sense that this will have a happy ending for either of them. At this point, the Narrator is forced to question the quality and truth of his own memories and those of everyone else. As he has written his chronicle, he has always been reliant on the stories of others. As the novel ends, he is in bed with May Price, who has begun to act as a mother figure—and possibly a lover—to him. It is unclear whether he will view his future with optimism, because what is real to him today will soon become an untrustworthy memory. The Shadow Lines received great acclaim, despite its challenging style. But read carefully, as a whole, the novel is an ingenious, occasionally frustrating nesting structure, much like memory itself. The Shadow Lines Amitav Ghosh. Save Download. Enjoy this free preview Unlock all 25 pages of this Study Guide by subscribing today. Get started. The Shadow Line (TV Mini-Series ) - IMDb

Symbols All Symbols. Theme Wheel. In-depth summary and analysis of every part of The Shadow Lines. Visual theme-tracking, too. Explanations, analysis, and visualizations of The Shadow Lines 's themes. The Shadow Lines 's important quotes, sortable by theme, character, or part. Description, analysis, and timelines for The Shadow Lines 's characters. Explanations of The Shadow Lines 's symbols, and tracking of where they appear. An interactive data visualization of The Shadow Lines 's plot and themes. Stephen's College, and Oxford. He worked briefly at a New newspaper called the Indian Express before beginning to write novels. As of , Ghosh has written eight novels and six nonfiction works, including several essay collections. His writing has also appeared in a number of publications in India and around the world. He lives with his wife, the author Deborah Baker, in New York, and the couple has two children. Ghosh has taught literature at several colleges and universities, including Queens College and Harvard. In , he was named a Ford Foundation Art of Change Fellow, which is an award that recognizes artists and cultural leaders based in the US who demonstrate a commitment to social justice. Historical Context of The Shadow Lines Though the Partition of British India is mostly a background event in The Shadow Lines , it is partially responsible for the conflicts that the narrator and his family experience over the course of the novel. Many European powers developed colonies and established trading relationships with India from its "discovery" in the fifteenth century onward. The shadow line has no such lightness or let up, and the nearest I can get to compare my feeling at the end is the 'Get Carter' Michael Caine film. A fine cast does this justice and an excellent script made Thursday evenings a night in! A huge well done to the writer and all the actors who made this so memorable. If you remember Stephen Rea as Carter Brandon in 'I didn't know you cared' one of the best comedy series ever IMHO , who would have imagined he would progress to being one of the most memorable screen villains ever. Looking for some great streaming picks? Check out some of the IMDb editors' favorites movies and shows to round out your Watchlist. Visit our What to Watch page. Sign In. Keep track of everything you watch; tell your friends. Full Cast and Crew. Release Dates. Official Sites. Company Credits. Technical Specs. Episode List. Plot Summary. Plot Keywords. Parents Guide. External Sites. User Reviews. User Ratings. External Reviews. Metacritic Reviews. Photo Gallery. Trailers and Videos. Crazy Credits. Alternate Versions. Rate This. Episode Guide. It may be his first day back on the job but he's soon Added to Watchlist. Top-Rated Episodes S1. Error: please try again. The Evolution of Armie Hammer. TV Series Done. Roket - Series. Netflix Mini series to be seen. Greatest TV Shows you didn't watch. Use the HTML below. You must be a registered user to use the IMDb rating plugin. How can anyone divide a memory? Jul 20, Srividya rated it really liked it Shelves: srividyaschallenge , indian-authors. This book was recommended to me by a friend who had simply loved it. She claimed the book to be one that was meant to be read several times, with each reading rendering a deeper understanding and probably a different interpretation. I was naturally curious and wanted to see what she meant by that statement. With that in mind, I promised to read it with her and discuss it. Of course, I was really lazy and never got around to reading it, until today. As I sit to review this book, the first thought This book was recommended to me by a friend who had simply loved it. As I sit to review this book, the first thought that comes to my mind is that Man is either a master or a slave or even worse a victim of his memories. His is a world of blurred lines, lines that were interpreted differently by him as a boy and which is perhaps seen differently today as a man. It is a story of a boy growing into a man, living in the shadow world of memories, which are so powerful that it has an impact on his present. Set against the backdrop of some of the most important historical moments of the world, including the Second World War, Partition and the communal violence in Dhaka and Calcutta, this is a tale of love, of passion, of death, of the pains of growing up and lastly a tale of memories, which somehow never let you go. I believe this is a book, which portrays how we as humans live life in the shadow lines of our memory. It then becomes a tale of a boy who lives in a world of memories, which include both his memories as well as the memories of those around him. Life as we live today is filled with such memories, which not only include our own but also those of others around us. If we were to write a story around those memories, reflections will show the shadow lines that exist between perception and reality. And I believe that the author is trying to emphasise this point in this story. The nameless narrator in this book takes you through his story, which despite being his own, is influenced by his family and friends, making it a sum of their memories rather than his own. It is a story that begins 13 years before his birth and ends on the night when he is returning to India from . It is a story that introduces you to the two most important people in his life, Tridib and Ila, and how they influenced him, his decisions and ultimately his life. Their memories are entwined with his to such an extent that he is a man who can easily find his way in London, despite never having visited the city earlier. However, the saddest part is that he remembers a London of yesteryears as opposed to the one that is today! As I said earlier, the book was one big ramble from the narrator, which made me feel as if I was caught in a blur. Of course, being happy about finishing a book does not in any way mean that I totally understood it. Honestly, I am as clueless today while reviewing this book as I was when I began reading it. While some things were made clear at the end, I still felt like being left hanging, wondering what happened next. Despite the lack of clarity or maybe because of it, I found beauty in this book. Today I understand what my friend meant when she said that this is a book that you may have to read many times before you truly understand the depths involved. With extremely confused feelings and yet strangely happy, I recommend this book to everyone because honestly and perhaps selfishly I want to hear your thoughts about this one! Finally a big thank you to Eunice who recommended this book to me and made me read it. It was a wonderful, albeit a blurred journey, which I totally enjoyed. View all 10 comments. Jul 21, Rose rated it it was ok Recommends it for: Students of South Asian history, people who like to read about travel. Shelves: india , utter-dreck , overrated , read-in , historical-fiction. This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. I'm so annoyed at this book. It's really got some illustrative descriptions of the Subcontinent. The dialogue syntax is weird, but kind of neat - there are no quotation marks. And the story isn't really anything close to linear. But even though it's got this weird layout, I've found myself going through it at a pretty reasonable clip. And his close family friend that he attacked just brushed it off the next morning. I might be willing to brush this off as an effect of the non-PC times in which this book took place. But its copyright is for , so I'm going to continue to be annoyed. I'm going to finish it, just because I'm less than pages til the end and would like to say I've completed it. Maybe I'll be a little less annoyed when I let the author conclude the story. EDIT: I stopped at page out of I skimmed to the end and got the gist of it. As stated earlier, I was way into it for a while, and that misogynistic bullshit annoyed me too much. I will say that I loved the prose in the portion where he was able to navigate a house without ever having been in it before. This passage and others bring up the themes of going to a place versus really knowing a place. This one just didn't have enough. Incidentally, Rushdie's Midnight's Children, which was set primarily in India and Pakistan explored the issue more than this book did, and this book was set in Bengal and Dhaka. The s in the east of India and East Pakistan. Another day, another riot. A man is killed and another family lives with the loss. It's an early Ghosh novel and while it's good I found it to be a little disjointed. A story mainly told through various characters telling stories about their experiences. The narrator's grandmother left Dhaka prior to the Partition and started a new life in Calcutta. Later, relatives in the foreign service spend time in England including the Blitz and a English fam The s in the east of India and East Pakistan. Later, relatives in the foreign service spend time in England including the Blitz and a English family comes into their lives. The story jumps around time periods, events in four countries, experiences and memories. The focus is on what happened to an older cousin but it was very much a timepiece of the broader events in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh their relationship with the English, their neighbours and themselves. I'm having a hard time figuring out what to say about this. The description and some of the reviews say this is, on the surface, a story of two families - one Indian, one English. I found it only the story of the Indian family who happened to know the white English family and who occasionally spent time with one or other of them. By that I mean that the Indian family sometimes interacted just with themselves, but the white family members interacted only with the Indian family members, rather tha I'm having a hard time figuring out what to say about this. By that I mean that the Indian family sometimes interacted just with themselves, but the white family members interacted only with the Indian family members, rather than sometimes just with each other. The story is not linear. The narrator is variously a pre-teen or an adult in his twenties. While told in the first person, nearly all of the action takes place in the past. He tells either of his own experiences or of those told to him. These latter may have taken place before the birth of the narrator, and are often told combined with his memory of the story having been told to him. As a reader it was more easily followed, than trying to explain it. On the other hand, the author definitely had a deeper message and I thought he did not carry it out well. There was much more of the family stuff, and little of the fact that Muslims and Hindus lived side by side. His point, as I understood it, is that we are all people, more or less the same, and that boundaries between countries are arbitrary. Frankly, I found this odd. What little I know of Partition is that it happened because people of different religions were treated differently, both by their government and by society. Perhaps I am wrong. Most of the story takes place just after partition of India and Pakistan. I wish I knew this part of history better, but I do not. Also, I am not particularly familiar with some of the Indian terms. I was able to just move on, but at the same time I knew I was missing some things. Even with these criticisms, I wanted to keep reading. Ghosh writes in a style that pleases me and I won't hesitate to pick him up again. The Shadow Lines is one of Ghosh's earlier books, which speaks of the early brilliance of this author. At the start, the reader is drawn into what appears to be a family history, but the history quickly becomes disjointed and erratic, the time of telling jumping decades ahead, turning the corner into a new story, spinning back, a chapter ending before it has begun! But if you persist, you become aware of a rhythm, a poetic telling of a tale from the past, the present and the future you are some The Shadow Lines is one of Ghosh's earlier books, which speaks of the early brilliance of this author. But if you persist, you become aware of a rhythm, a poetic telling of a tale from the past, the present and the future you are sometimes not sure which. This rhythm begins to accelerate, until you realise that time is converging upon a single event, one that is affected by the pasts being narrated, one that will affect the futures you are being told about. This pace peaks in paragraphs which mix time and space so beautifully and concisely that you are left with your head spinning. The characters are incredibly vivid, well thought out and all have a place in the story. And the story is a story about stories, and a story about freedom. About how we all live in the story of our lives, but how these stories can be told from mirrored lives separated by shodow lines which are all but our own, how we try to achieve freedom in many guises a teenager's freedom from parents and Indian culture, an activist's freedom from guilt, Hindu and Muslim freedoms from their miror images - each other. The book shows us the futility of trying to achieve these freedoms, but it is done beautifully and poetically. A must-read! May 28, Tnahsin Garg rated it it was ok. It was okayish, I guess? I went over this book in the last few days when I was busy writing my PhD thesis and probably that is why I couldn't focus on it. Several times, my attention drifted to matters more pressing than that of the confused narrator and his babble. There's something about Bangladesh, partition, etc - matters of great political importance for the educated I presume. But to my ignorant self, all the historical background of 's against which this novel is set was not arou Meh. But to my ignorant self, all the historical background of 's against which this novel is set was not arousing enough. There's hardly any flow in the book, the prose is boring to death. Narration jumps between events set apart in time haphazardly, and this does not help the poor reader you see. I know Mr. Ghosh is a big shot in the Indian literary scene, so I'll definitely try some of his other books at some point in the future. But right now, this was his first book I read and it was not a good book to start with. No sir. Final Verdict: Go for it if you are, let's say, Bengali? Maybe you get more out of it? Don't expect any thrill. Yet another book which I think ought to be made mandatory reading at the school level, especially now when so many seem to think that nationalism and nationality are black and white ideas, too rigid to accommodate blurred lines or gray areas. As an added bonus, we might finally teach students from a fairly early stage to see how history is always an act of selective forgetting and that how importance is given to events in history is largely determined by who is retelling history and to whom. Per Yet another book which I think ought to be made mandatory reading at the school level, especially now when so many seem to think that nationalism and nationality are black and white ideas, too rigid to accommodate blurred lines or gray areas. Perhaps the most eye-opening aspect of this book is that it neatly shows how some events which are incredibly important parts of our story as communities- can be unwittingly sidelined in our collective memories. Regarding nationality and national identities, Ghosh has something quite simple and elegant to say: that the borders that separate us often become mirrors because, despite the collective efforts of society to alienate us from those on the other side of the 'wall', we are more similar than we may have ever imagined possible. Aug 03, Suzanne rated it liked it. I really wanted to like this book. There are some great observations from a child's point of view. There are also some real sentiments from the elderly grandmother teacher. I easily put this book down to watch tv, talk to my cat, tweeze my eye brows or anything else. Either I couldn't follow him or I didn't care enough to try. I thought it would be nice to read about a middle class Indian for I really wanted to like this book. I thought it would be nice to read about a middle class Indian for a change. The narrator's family was intimately connected with an English middle class family. I didn't find them or their relationship engrossing either. The political upheaval , partition of Pakistan, should have been a lightening rod. It was significant , but buried. I found the prose to be memorable , but the characters' stories, and plot to be shadows, not fully developed or at least not satisfying for me. I was expecting something else entirely out of this story when I read the blurb and what I got out of it was very different but exciting. I loved the way the story pulled between the past and the present with a fair amount of foreshadowing thrown in. The story is basically about an unnamed narrator, who is portrayed almost as an omniscient being and is related to th I was expecting something else entirely out of this story when I read the blurb and what I got out of it was very different but exciting.

The Shadow Lines Study Guide | Literature Guide | LitCharts

The man was given a few weeks by the British colonial authorities to draw what would become the borders dividing India and Pakistan—mere lines on paper which created a division so painful its memory persists like an open wound, salted every day by a communal suspicion that erupted overnight and continues to shape social relations in the subcontinent to this date. Map depicting Radcliffe's bifurcation of Bengal between India and Pakistan. The territory of Punjab was similarly divided between the two countries-to-be on communal lines. It is these shadow lines that moved WH Auden to write his poem on the Partition two decades later, and it is these that the lives of the characters in Ghosh's novel are pitted against. The Shadow Lines is a poignant reminder of the trauma the separation of continues to inflict on people several decades and generations later. Told in a seamless stream of consciousness, this is a story that unfolds through the intersection of the unreliability of memory and the arbitrariness of borders; through the inability of one to prevent the other from solidifying. Time, space, and the links of memory collapse into each other as the unnamed narrator weaves his own memories with those he's come to remember and regard, walking the reader through a tale comprising four generations' shadowy experiences of freedom, nation, family, home, and history, all of them shaped in some ways by the partition and brought together time and again by those dividing lines. The first half of the narrative is spent exploring and examining memory and relationships formed during the second world war, the period immediately following the Partition, and all the way through to the present day in the s, scattered between London, Calcutta, and Dhaka. In many ways, The Shadow Lines maps a transition from a borderless world to one defined by its dividing lines. Yet, as the narrator asks: "How can anyone divide a memory? As we get closer to the end we see that for all the nationalisms that divide us, the lives we live are mirrors of each other; that despite the seemingly, impenetrably antagonistic distance of borders, the events in cities like Calcutta and Dhaka remain as closely bound as two sides of a looking-glass. More importantly, we see how the freedoms we seek—freedom from parental authority and hand-me- down cultures, from guilt, from the 'other' so integral to our own identities—are futile illusions that only beget more loss. One of the impressive aspects of the storytelling in The Shadow Lines is how every character's memory is central to the narrative; a protagonist in their own right; and while each of their stories has its own weight and part to play, none is more or less important than the other. Thus, even though the beginning of the story reads slower, it is no less engaging for it. Like pieces of a puzzle, everything comes together in the breathtaking crescendo of the last 70 pages where our characters attempt to cross over these shadow lines. It is hard not to see the relationships between some characters as allegorical. For instance, I found the relationship shared by Ila and Nick, as well as that between May and Tridib, to be representative, in many ways, of the manner in which British attitudes and responsibility towards its erstwhile colonies and its people took shape in the decades following the Partition. I was particularly taken by the author's adeptness at describing the way time and history build and wear away at cities, those physical monuments of memory: just as the narrator creates his own understanding of the cities he is in through other people's descriptions of their past, so could I visualise the streets and sights of Delhi and Calcutta through the author's eyes, so different from what I know them to be like today and yet so much the same. That history is made not only of memory but also of selective forgetting is also tackled brilliantly in this book, notably in its dealing with the memory and the erasure of the riots in Calcutta, and how they were offshoots of events happening thousands of miles away but in the same country, as well as those taking place a few miles away but across the border. Not only does the correlation here echo the pain and events of the partition, but the manner in which the riot is handled and forgotten rings eerily true to events as recent as those of January —riots that were provoked for much the same reason as they were in , , , and all the years between and since. As one of his earliest novels, The Shadow Lines may not be representative of all the strength and beauty that Ghosh's writing is now known for, but it is nevertheless an immensely important novel—a glowing fictional reminder of the realities we share despite our fraught histories, and of all that we choose, but cannot afford, to forget. Dec 08, Regina Lindsey rated it really liked it Shelves: historical-fiction , fiction , books-you-must-read-before-you , amitav-ghosh , blurring-of- borders , generations , india , indian-author , indian-authors , shelfari-fiction. The unnamed narrator, Indian born and English educated, has grown up with the stories of his uncle, Tridib. It is through these seemingly unrelated stories that the larger picture slowly unfold until, eventually, you realize that they are all culminating in a single, tragic event that impacts both families. Ultimately, the story is about stories. The stories of family history, the stories in history, and the stories needed to deal with traumatic events. The way the stories are presented may cause issue for some readers because the shifts are subtle with no time marker to establish past, present, or future. In my opinion, Amitav Ghosh is one of the most brilliant minds of our time. I tried hard but I could think of none. None, that is, other that war. One of the most fascinating tools Ghosh employs is the use of mirror images in dealing with personal issues and those of larger national and international scale. View all 4 comments. Amitav Ghosh is one of my favourite authors, so it was really interesting for me to see how different this early novel is, to the later ones of his I have read. The writing is as sublime as I've come to expect, but where The Shadow Lines is quite unique is in the way the story is told. This is in fact a story about telling stories, written in the style of a series of stories from the point of view of the story-teller. Yes, but kind of brilliant. It was almost accordian-like at times Amitav Ghosh is one of my favourite authors, so it was really interesting for me to see how different this early novel is, to the later ones of his I have read. It was almost accordian-like at times accordianesque?? It would be too difficult to try to give a sensible synopsis, so here are a few of my favourite passages, showing how equally entertaining Ghosh can be, at both his most lyrical and base. As a young child, the narrator's mother reveals how eagerly he has waited for Ila's visit: At that moment I hated my mother. For the first time in my life she had betrayed me. She had given me away, she had made public, then and for ever, the inequality of our needs; she had given Ila the knowledge of her power and she had left me defenceless, naked in the face of that unthinkable, adult truth: that need is not transitive, that one may need without oneself being needed. Family dramas: Soon the two brothers were quarrelling too. And since they were both lawyers their quarrels took a peculiarly vicious, legalistic form, in which very little was actually said. Instead, they would send each other notes on legal stationery. And finally, the English memsahib accompanies the family to their ancestral home in Dhaka: Khalil! Khalil, run, run, go quickly and buy some toilet paper. What if she wants to shit? My father always said: the first thing to remember if a foreigner comes to your house is to buy toilet paper. He knew: he read books. Apr 20, Julie rated it it was ok Shelves: books-to-read-before-you-die , fiction. Last night I was watching an episode of Lost, and as usual with this TV series, I was confused about what was going on. Is this the past? And all of a sudden I realized that I have the same muddled confusion over this book. The story is about a Bengali boy and follows his life from a child in Calcutta, through a college education in England and returning home to India. I enjoyed many of the issues covered in this book - people getting displaced by Partition, living as a foreigner in another country and racial and religious bigotry. But the style of writing made reading this book feel like work instead of pleasure. The story is told as a young man's reminisence of his past, so some of the jumping around makes sense. But I found Ghosh's sentence structure incredibly difficult to read. Here is a single sentence: That wasn't surprising, for my grandmother's contempt for the Sheheb had nothing to do with drink at all, as my father thought: it was founded on the same iron fairness which prompted her, when she became headmistress, to dismiss one of her closest friends - a good-natured but chronically lazy woman - from her job in the school: at bottom she thought the Shaheb was not fit for his job, that he was weak, essentially weak, backbone-less; it was impossible to think of him being firm under threat, of reacting to a difficult or dangerous situation with that controlled, accurate violence which was the quality she prized above all others in men who had to deal with matters of state. I'm glad I never had to diagram that sentence! I think this is the perfect book. It isn't a novel. It is something beyond what words can comprehend. Our lives are made up of memories. Maybe proper, maybe improper. This is a live example of that. The strange yet a unique and beautiful way of narration makes the story much more intriguing. It literally goes beyond time and space to build an exquisite stockpile of emotions. A person doesn't read this book, he feels it. There have been very few books in which I didn't skim through some parts whi I think this is the perfect book. There have been very few books in which I didn't skim through some parts which I felt boring. This was one of them. You read each and every word carefully yet without getting bored. As Khushwant singh said for this book, "This is how language should be used. This is how a how a novel should be written. A perfect book in all aspects. Now, I'm going to read all of Ghosh's work now. And I recommend it to everyone. Goodreads allows only 5 stars although this is way beyond rating. Mar 30, Celeste rated it it was amazing Shelves: india , england , fiction , bangladesh , This is a book about people and places and the connections between them. For me, the most poignant parts of the book are the times when the narrator contemplates the meaning of maps and borders, or the difficulty of rendering meaning to violence with language. There are love stories in the book, and sex, and politics. A moving read, if not a happy one. This is a book that you will want to read in one sitting. I didn't, but I wish that I had. The book follows the memories of the narrator, and like This is a book about people and places and the connections between them. The book follows the memories of the narrator, and like memories, does not follow a linear narrative. This pulls you into the story, but also means that if you put the book down and come back to it you may not remember whether the events being described are happening in the present or in the past. What would it change? It's a mirage;the whole thing is a mirage. How can anyone divide a memory? Jul 20, Srividya rated it really liked it Shelves: srividyaschallenge , indian-authors. This book was recommended to me by a friend who had simply loved it. She claimed the book to be one that was meant to be read several times, with each reading rendering a deeper understanding and probably a different interpretation. I was naturally curious and wanted to see what she meant by that statement. With that in mind, I promised to read it with her and discuss it. Of course, I was really lazy and never got around to reading it, until today. As I sit to review this book, the first thought This book was recommended to me by a friend who had simply loved it. As I sit to review this book, the first thought that comes to my mind is that Man is either a master or a slave or even worse a victim of his memories. His is a world of blurred lines, lines that were interpreted differently by him as a boy and which is perhaps seen differently today as a man. It is a story of a boy growing into a man, living in the shadow world of memories, which are so powerful that it has an impact on his present. Set against the backdrop of some of the most important historical moments of the world, including the Second World War, Partition and the communal violence in Dhaka and Calcutta, this is a tale of love, of passion, of death, of the pains of growing up and lastly a tale of memories, which somehow never let you go. I believe this is a book, which portrays how we as humans live life in the shadow lines of our memory. It then becomes a tale of a boy who lives in a world of memories, which include both his memories as well as the memories of those around him. Life as we live today is filled with such memories, which not only include our own but also those of others around us. If we were to write a story around those memories, reflections will show the shadow lines that exist between perception and reality. And I believe that the author is trying to emphasise this point in this story. The nameless narrator in this book takes you through his story, which despite being his own, is influenced by his family and friends, making it a sum of their memories rather than his own. It is a story that begins 13 years before his birth and ends on the night when he is returning to India from London. It is a story that introduces you to the two most important people in his life, Tridib and Ila, and how they influenced him, his decisions and ultimately his life. Their memories are entwined with his to such an extent that he is a man who can easily find his way in London, despite never having visited the city earlier. However, the saddest part is that he remembers a London of yesteryears as opposed to the one that is today! As I said earlier, the book was one big ramble from the narrator, which made me feel as if I was caught in a blur. Of course, being happy about finishing a book does not in any way mean that I totally understood it. Honestly, I am as clueless today while reviewing this book as I was when I began reading it. While some things were made clear at the end, I still felt like being left hanging, wondering what happened next. Despite the lack of clarity or maybe because of it, I found beauty in this book. Today I understand what my friend meant when she said that this is a book that you may have to read many times before you truly understand the depths involved. With extremely confused feelings and yet strangely happy, I recommend this book to everyone because honestly and perhaps selfishly I want to hear your thoughts about this one! Finally a big thank you to Eunice who recommended this book to me and made me read it. It was a wonderful, albeit a blurred journey, which I totally enjoyed. View all 10 comments. Jul 21, Rose rated it it was ok Recommends it for: Students of South Asian history, people who like to read about travel. Shelves: india , utter-dreck , overrated , read-in , historical-fiction. This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. I'm so annoyed at this book. It's really got some illustrative descriptions of the Subcontinent. The dialogue syntax is weird, but kind of neat - there are no quotation marks. And the story isn't really anything close to linear. But even though it's got this weird layout, I've found myself going through it at a pretty reasonable clip. And his close family friend that he attacked just brushed it off the next morning. Tha'mma thinks that Tridib is the type of person who seems 'determined to waste his life in idle self-indulgence', one who refuses to use his family connections to establish a career. Unlike his grandmother, the narrator loves listening to Tridib. For the narrator, Tridib's lore is very different from the collection of facts and figures. The narrator is sexually attracted to Ila but his feelings are passive. He never expresses his feelings to her afraid to lose the relationship that exists between them. However, one day he involuntarily shows his feelings when she, unaware of his feelings for her, undresses in front of him. She feels sorry for him but immediately abandons him to visit Nick's the Price family's son, and the man who she later marries bedroom. Tha'mma does not like Ila; she continually asks the narrator "Why do you always speak for that whore? Tridib is in love with May and sacrificed his life to rescue her from mobs in the communal riots of in Dhaka. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. This article may rely excessively on sources too closely associated with the subject , potentially preventing the article from being verifiable and neutral. She informs the narrator of who Nick is, and the narrator understands that Nick is his competition for Ila's affection. Ila draws a map in the dust of Mrs. Price's house and adds a room for Magda, her doll, who is the baby for the purposes of the game. When everything is set, Ila tells the narrator what "happened" to Magda at school that day: the ugly school bully chased the beautiful blonde Magda home, yelling slurs at her—but Nick Price saved her from being beaten up. When Ila starts to cry, the narrator is angry and doesn't understand why she's crying. Finally, Tridib walks in with the children and listens to the narrator tell Ila's story. He encourages the narrator to not call Ila dumb for crying like the story is real, and he insists that everyone lives in stories. In , Tridib and May, who is nineteen at the time, begin writing to each other. They exchange photos after a year. In , Tridib sends May a very long letter recalling an experience he had as a boy in London, when he watched two strangers have sex in a bombed cinema. He tells May that he wants to meet her like those strangers did—as strangers in a ruin. May is flustered, but she makes plans to visit Tridib in India. Around the same time, Tha'mma, who is retired and has time on her hands for the first time in her life, receives word that her uncle Jethamoshai, who is in his nineties, still lives in the family home in Dhaka. She believes that it's her duty to bring Jethamoshai home to India. Not long after this comes to light, the Shaheb receives a job posting in Dhaka, and he, Mayadebi, and Robi move there. Finally, Mayadebi invites Tha'mma to visit, and they make plans to try to save their uncle from the growing unrest in the Muslim- majority city. May makes plans to travel to Calcutta and then to Dhaka with Tha'mma. Tridib decides to accompany them to Dhaka. The narrator joins Tridib and his father to pick May up from the train station. Over the next few days, the narrator accompanies Tridib and May as they drive around and see the sights. He shows her the table in Raibajar, and she tells him that Ila was a victim of bullying, but Nick never saved her. When they visit the Victoria Memorial, May becomes suddenly emotional. Tridib tells her that it's their ruin, which puzzles the narrator. He understands that there's a relationship between May and Tridib that he won't understand. A few days later, the narrator experiences a harrowing bus ride home from school as the driver tries to protect the dozen boys from the angry mobs in the streets. Meanwhile, in Dhaka, the Shaheb warns Mayadebi and Tha'mma that trouble is brewing there, but Tha'mma insists on seeing Jethamoshai anyway. Thirteen-year-old Robi is excited to see "trouble" and goes with them to the old house in Dhaka. There, a Muslim mechanic named Saifuddin greets them and explains that a rickshaw driver named Khalil cares for Jethamoshai. When Khalil arrives, he leads his guests into the house. Jethamoshai doesn't recognize his nieces, but he tells Tridib that he's waiting for his family to return so that he can take them to court and gain full ownership of the house. The driver races to the door and says that there's trouble, and they have to leave. Khalil agrees to drive Jethamoshai in his rickshaw to Mayadebi's house. When they're in the car, they turn a corner and come face to face with a mob. It surrounds the car and breaks the windshield. When the mob descends on the rickshaw, Tha'mma tells the driver to go, but May gets out to try to save Jethamoshai. Tridib follows her, but Tridib, Jethamoshai, and Khalil are all brutally murdered by the mob. The narrator's parents tell him later that Tridib died in an accident. The following year, Tha'mma gives her beloved gold chain away to fund the war with Pakistan and appears crazy to the narrator. His mother explains that Tha'mma hasn't been the same since "they" killed Tridib. In college, the narrator continues to both love Ila and find her frustrating, as she never understands why he is so insistent on remembering Tridib's stories or their own childhood antics. Once, during a summer holiday, she convinces the narrator and Robi to go with her to a nightclub. Robi doesn't want to go, but at the club, he forbids Ila from dancing with another man. She screams at them that she lives in London so she can be free of this kind of oppression.

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