From my Review of Rohinton Mistry's "A Fine Balance"
written for www.amazon.com

    I used be a voracious reader till the growing demands of work and family left me with little time. Yet, of the thousands of books that I have read and enjoyed, there are a very few that I remember well, that I constantly return to, and that I feel have, in some way or the other, shaped and defined me. Among these I include the "War and Peace", "Feynman's Lectures in Physics", the poetry of Tulsidas, the short stories of Chekov and Tolstoy, and much more. It is too early to tell how long Mistry's "A Fine Balance" will live with me. It was only a few months back that I first read it. 

    It is a very finely crafted work, of that I have no doubt. Even great novels like "War and Peace" and "Anna Karenina" show serious structural flaws --- not that those defects mar their beauty in any serious way. Yet, "A Fine Balance" is like a flawless gem. 

    This is a compassionate book. From the horrors of life in a certain place and a certain time, it extracts the essential humanity within us. It gives us hope even as it shows how little hope there is. Like silver thread on dark cloth, it emphasizes the beauty, the strength, and the nobility of the human animal, even as it describes his fragility, his brutality, and his baseness. 

    I have a feeling that I will return to this book. I was led to it by a reading of Mistry's very fine book of short stories "Swimming Lessons And Other Stories From Firozshah Bagh". I was a little disappointed by his second work, his first novel, "Such a Long Journey". After a fine start it went astray, like Oxus in the desert. But "A Fine Balance" makes up for everything.