A Fine Balance

We all read for different reasons, so others are no doubt justified in their liking of it, but I was disappointed by A Fine Balance.

It reminded me of two books: The Grapes of Wrath and Dominique Lapierre's The City of Joy. It's like Grapes in the way everything seems to be getting worse and worse. It reminded me of City because it features beggars in the slums of India and because it seems to be written to make a point.

No one can say that Rohinton Mistry's characters are unrealistic. They're complex yet predictable. They're true to themselves, yet surprising. Yet it still seemed like they were being used for something, which made them somehow less than human.

I think I missed that particularity that makes reading worthwhile. The books I admire have a strong sense of place. If you detach a person from their world, you can't understand them. The author has a duty to describe the world. If she does it right, you've done something by reading her book that you never could have done on your own; your eyes have been opened and your soul enlarged.

For all the manifest Indian weirdness in Mistry's book, I still felt like it could all have taken place anywhere. I'm not going to remember it like I remember the slums even in the badly written (or at least badly translated) City of Joy, or the dirty campsites and dusty fields of the Grapes of Wrath. Good writing makes me think, "This is what it feels like to be alive." I get more of that from one paragraph of Colette than I did from the 600 pages of this novel.

Sure, there are human truths and inspiring moments. I learned from the characters. I felt like there were morals to be drawn from the story. I laughed out loud and even cried once or twice. But I never learned what it was like to be the characters, or maybe I just failed to understand them. I wanted to breathe Indian air for a while, but I never got outside of myself.