by Rohinton Mistry

isbn: 0679776451
subject: Fiction and Literature
finished: 2/6/2002

Dina Dalal is a widow who maintains a fragile financial independence from her boorish, controlling brother. To make ends meet she takes in a boarder, Maneck, and hires two tailors, Ishvar and Om, to perform sewing work that she sells to an export company. Individually and together, the group faces many difficulties during Indira Ghandi's emergency. The narrative skips around, filling in bits of each character's history -- by about halfway through the book we have a pretty complete picture of where each of them is coming from.

Overall, A Fine Balance is a good book. A weakness, however, is that it reads a little like a guided tour of India's social problems. Fortunately, Mistry writes very compelling characters -- this often saves the book from seeming too manipulative, although it sometimes reads like Candide set in India, with no hope surviving unsquashed and no good deed going unpunished.