Review by New York Times Review
TECHNOLOGICAL INNOVATION and economic development have brought great wealth to a few parts of India, but they have further marginalized the country's adivasis, or tribals, the aboriginal communities of forest dwellers and farmers who live outside of mainstream society. These groups were systematically victimized under colonial rule, when the British Raj passed legislation that classified them as criminals. The British-Indian government subjected adivasis to police brutality, herded them into reformatory settlements and forced them to perform hard labor. Adivasis - whose fate resembles that of North America's indigenous populations - have fared little better in independent India. Quasi-feudal agricultural systems have kept many of them in debt and poverty. Multinational corporations and government agencies have displaced them to build dams and extract valuable minerals, without providing adequate compensation. Their protests are often ignored, and in some cases have been met with violence. Frustrated, some tribals have embraced India's Maoist uprising, which seeks to overthrow the government. The writers Mahasweta Devi and Arundhati Roy have written passionately about the suffering of the adivasis and the proliferation of Maoism in rural India. Their work has provided invaluable correctives to prevailing narratives that cast adivasis as simpletons or savages and the Maoists as ruthless killers. But Devi's and Roy's books contain their own simplicities: They can be Manichaean in their outlook, presenting landlords or the government as monolithic, cruel tyrants, and tribals as earnest, righteous victims. Neel Mukherjee attempts to inject more complexity into these issues in his haunting novel "The Lives of Others," shortlisted for the 2014 Man Booker Prize. Mukherjee's work has always spotlighted the connections between power, poverty and injustice. "A Life Apart," his electrifying first book, follows an educated Bengali immigrant in London who descends into an abyss of male prostitution and human trafficking. "The Lives of Others," primarily set in 1960s Bengal, hinges on Supratik Ghosh, the scion of an affluent paper manufacturing family, who abandons his cushy south Calcutta home to join the Maoist rebellion gaining ground. Supratik writes letters to a mysterious recipient - possibly a lover or a family member (it's not immediately clear) - recounting his time toiling alongside the farmers and describing the overwhelming beauty and abysmal poverty of the countryside, where deceptive landlords and corrupt policemen have stolen land from adivasis and other peasants, reducing them to a "form of slavery." Supratik and his comrades begin to educate the beleaguered farmers about organizing against exploitation, and he eventually teams up with them to murder oppressive landlords and destroy the paperwork trapping the farmers in debt. He vividly captures the violence in his letters, which also reveal his prejudices, especially his propensity to romanticize the "selflessness and generosity" of the adivasis, who are governed by "a kind of simplicity." He isn't "keen on talk" of "irrational" things like feelings, and his repression has definite consequences. It prevents him from dealing with the ethical implications of his actions, and it also inhibits readers from forming a deeper emotional connection with these first-person portions of the novel. The third-person sections form the bulk of the book and are far more affecting. They shift between pre-independence Calcutta, plagued by colonialism, famine and the aftershocks of World War II, and the Calcutta of the 1960s, where students are embracing Marx, the Grateful Dead and heroin. Mukherjee introduces Supratik's affluent relatives, who live together in a multistoried, joint family home. Prafullanath Ghosh, the family patriarch, was cheated out of his father's jewelry business by his elder brother but has managed to build a lucrative paper empire through a combination of hard work and duplicity. Hurtling toward old age, he watches his family's wealth disintegrate, thanks to his own ineptitude, his children's apathy and the organizing laborers of Bengal, who are being spurred on by the Communist Party. Meanwhile the rest of the family grapples with their own woes, ranging from the commonplace to the bizarre. Chhaya, Supratik's spinster aunt, has been unable to marry thanks to her dark skin and cockeyes. She hurls insults at her sisters-in-law and pines for the affections of her brother, Priyo, who used to dote on her. Now married, Priyo patronizes a brothel, where he pays a prostitute to defecate on his stomach, but this routine comes to an end when an indignant band of prostitutes and pimps gives him a beating. MUKHERJEE'S ROVING CHARACTER sketches highlight the cruelties and contradictions of middle-class Bengali life, in which the success of a downtrodden family member "swells and replenishes" the "poison sacs" of others, and people fear being shamed in front of a crowd that is always awaiting "the unexpected treat of a man's supreme public humiliation." These scenes can be dramatic, but overall, the pacing is measured, and the descriptions vibrant and leisurely: Mukherjee spends paragraphs on one character applying makeup, and pages on abstract mathematics. Like his previous novel, "The Lives of Others" features an old-fashioned syntax, packed with prepositions and laced with anachorisms, that feels surprisingly fresh and bold. Mukherjee can recall Tolstoy in his ability to bring to life a diverse and expansive set of characters and to sharply evoke their interior worlds. Here is Supratik's mother contemplating her son's absence: "At times a different light fell on the boulder weighing down on her and it blazed into a burden of outrage: She wished she had cracked open his skull to read his brains, riced with the maggots of his secret thoughts, and prevented everything that followed." By the end of the book, none of Mukherjee's characters fit into neat categories of saint or sinner. Rich or poor, they have all experienced some type of anguish, and they are all contributing to a ceaseless cycle of violence: the landlords who savagely oppress destitute villagers; the adivasis who brutally murder their oppressors; Supratik, who has killed many people and betrayed various loved ones; and the policemen who eventually apprehend and torture him. "The Lives of Others" is a sophisticated meditation on suffering that invites empathy for characters who embrace violent ideologies as a result of injustice without ever vindicating the horrific violence they commit. Likewise, it demonstrates how oppressive socio-economic structures brutalize people while showing that brutality can sometimes be random, and its causes ultimately elusive. None of Mukherjee's characters fit into neat categories of saint or sinner. HIRSH SAWHNEY is the author of a forthcoming novel, "South Haven," and the editor of the anthology "Delhi Noir." He teaches at Wesleyan University.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [December 21, 2014]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Mukherjee's West Bengal upstairs/downstairs epic can be raw but honest as he delves unflinchingly into the struggles of a family caught up in the social, economic, and political turmoil of 1960s India. The once solidly middle-class Ghoshes occupy all four floors of their Calcutta home. The top floor belongs to the highest-ranking members, parents Prafullanath and Charubala. Below, each floor is assigned to family members in descending order of rank, from eldest son Adinath and wife Sandhya all the way down to a storage room on the ground floor where Purba, widow of the Ghoshes' youngest son, lives with her two children, one of whom is a math savant, possibly autistic. The family's paper and publishing businesses are failing, and their once shiny and respectable patina is starting to corrode around the edges. Witness eldest grandson Supratik, who goes off to college and becomes a Marxist, determined to champion the rights of the poor and downtrodden. Mukherjee's scope is vast yet so intimately personal that it's easy imagine him donning different costumes for the characters as he composes their stories; perhaps literally walking in their shoes. How he accomplished such a wonderful feat is unknown. What is known is that this novel stands as a literary boon. Short-listed for the Man Booker Prize, its American edition was rushed into print.--Chavez, Donna Copyright 2014 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Money corrupts and wealth corrupts absolutely in Mukherjee's (A Life Apart) second novel, shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize-a devastatingly detailed account of a family's downfall amid the political turmoil and social unrest of India in the late 1960s and early '70s. In 1967, five generations of the Ghosh family occupy the four floors of their Calcutta home, from the top floor-where Prafullanath, the patriarch, suffers the indignities of old age; his wife tyrannizes her daughter-in-law; and his eldest son Adinath, responsible for running the overextended family paper business, resides with wife and children-down to street level, where the widow and two children of Prafullanath's youngest son share one small room. Adinath's two brothers and their families, along with their unmarriageable sister, complete the household, while servant Madan supplies unrequited compassion. Supratnik (Adinath's son) escapes to the countryside to sow Maoist rebellion as labor strife, jealousy, vice, and betrayal poisons relationships at home. Mukherjee reveals the unraveling social fabric through interwoven points of view. Powerful evocations of poverty and oppression begin in the prologue, recounting a debt-driven murder-suicide, and do not stop until the last excruciating scenes of police torture. This challenging epic has the scope of a political novel and the humanity of a family saga without sentimentality. Descriptions of a rooftop garden, the wonders of mathematics, and the charm of a secret flirtation offer brief respites from the economic and social injustices of post-independence India. (Oct.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
The evolution of an upper-class Bengali family in the late 1960s reflects India's political turbulence in this confidently expansive second novel from Mukherjee (A Life Apart, 2010), which has been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize.Like a rolling stone, Mukherjee's nonostentatious epic accrues its weight and mass gradually; it's a three-generational family saga that embraces tensions both micro- and macro-cosmic. The majestic Ghosh family mansion in Calcutta reflects the nation's entrenched economic hierarchy, with the wealthy patriarch, Prafullanath, and his wife, Charubala, on the top floor and the servant classes and spurned family members at the bottom. Prafullanath, once an entrepreneurial genius who built a fortune in the paper-making industry, is now a broken reed, his health ruined, his empire failing after bad investments. On the middle floors of the house live the second and third Ghosh generations, three married sons with their children and a sour spinster daughter, and below them, the disgraced widow of a bad-seed fourth son. The family's history is intricately, nonchronologically narrated in brief episodes that point up the power struggles, petty jealousies, cruelties and sexual attractions among the individual members. Mingled with these episodes are extracts from a diary written by Prafullanath's eldest grandson, Supratik, who has absconded to become a Communist Naxalite guerrilla among the rural poor. Supratik's chapters offer glimpses of the extremes of poverty and corruption in Bengal and of its essential beauties toothe green velvet of the rice paddies, the monsoon rains. But political violence emerges in Supratik's story, matched by union troubles at the Ghosh paper mills. After Supratik's eventual return to the Calcutta household, its unraveling gains pace. Mukherjee closes with two epilogues that offer contrasting views of the consequences. This is an immensely accomplished, steady-handed achievement, Victorian in its solidity, quietly enthralling in its insightful observation of the ties that bind. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
