Wonderful! . Review on Shadow Lines - Amitav Ghosh

I owe a lot to Amitav Ghosh and The Shadow Lines. Being the first Indian English author and the first book in English written by an Indian respectively, they led me on to read many other titles by many other Indian authors, each of which I thoroughly enjoyed reading.

I guess I am a regular sort of a reader. While reading, I use more my heart than anything else. I like to feel the myriad situations sketched by the author, to be happy with the protagonist, to grieve her agony. I like books which sway my emotions as the stories unfold before my eyes. And yes, what I like most is subtlety. Like a Monet. The bits and pieces don't impress you on their own. But when you look at the entire picture as a whole, from a distance, you get the full impact.

It is therefore no wonder that I have found The Shadow Lines to be one of the most impressive novels I have read ever.

The narrative is simple. It flows smoothly, back and forth between times, places and characters. The use of the first person and therefore a reflective style is very effectively used by Ghosh to say much more than the written word. The characters are so wonderful because they are so human. Many an Indian can identify with them.

The protagonist is a middle class boy who grows up in a middle class family. As a young boy he seldom gets to travel farther than his school. And yet his world spans far beyond, across continents. He paints up this world, rather vividly, borrowing colours from others. He uses Tridib's eyes to view a certain family in London, their house, the streets, the panic of war. He uses his grandmother's eyes to see her life in Dhaka as a young girl, her uncle and cousins, the other side of the big house where everything was upside down. He uses his cousin's eyes to view different parts of the world where she travelled, her aspirations for belonging, her heartaches caused by a reality as different from her dreams as she and her background was from those with whom she lived in those foreign lands.

Each of the characters in the story is very human, and yet special. Each character has strengths as well as vulnerabilities, which is why I guess they are so likeable. At a larger level I feel The Shadow Lines is all about human aspirations and dreams, about longingness and defeat, about courage and success. It is about home and uprootment. It is about helplessness of human beings in the face of events and situations beyond their control. It is about their tenacity to accept life the way it is, although many questions remain unanswered for ever.

All in all, a great story.