Family Matters (Vintage International) - Softcover

Mistry, Rohinton

Softcover

ISBN 10: 037570342X ISBN 13: 9780375703423

Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2003

Synopsis

Rohinton Mistry's enthralling novel is at once a domestic drama and an intently observed portrait of present-day Bombay in all its vitality and corruption. At the age of seventy-nine, Nariman Vakeel, already suffering from Parkinson's disease, breaks an ankle and finds himself wholly dependent on his family. His step-children, Coomy and Jal, have a spacious apartment (in the inaptly named Chateau Felicity), but are too squeamish and resentful to tend to his physical needs.

Nariman must now turn to his younger daughter, Roxana, her husband, Yezad, and their two sons, who share a small, crowded home. Their decision will test not only their material resources but, in surprising ways, all their tolerance, compassion, integrity, and faith. Sweeping and intimate, tragic and mirthful, Family Matters is a work of enormous emotional power.

About this title

Review:

As an epigraph to his humane and generous novel Family Matters, Rohinton Mistry uses a reverse version of Tolstoy's words from Anna Karenina--"Each happy family is happy in its own way, but all unhappy families resemble one another". The unhappy family in this book belongs to Nariman Vakeel, an elderly, retired English teacher in Bombay. His stepson Jal and stepdaughter Coomy look after the old man, who suffers from Parkinson's disease, but a street accident renders him even more in need of help. Resentfully Jal and Coomy provide it but, when opportunity offers, they deliver Nariman into the care (and flat) of his daughter Roxana, the much-loved offspring of what was an otherwise loveless marriage. Roxana is married with two children and lives in cramped conditions that the arrival of the now bed-ridden old man makes worse. The tensions of the present and rankling discontents from the past collide as Mistry's narrative unfolds. At the heart of the story is the literal claustrophobia of the flat and the metaphorical claustrophobia of a family bound tightly together by the deeply ambivalent emotions of its members but Family Matters is not a limited or restricted novel.

Through the stories of Roxana's husband Yezad and her sons Murad and Jehangir, Mistry opens the book to lives outside the family. Characters like Yezad's ebullient employer Mr Kapur, the eager but incompetent handyman Edul Munshi, the violinist Daisy Ichhaporia and others provide a keen sense of the wider world of Bombay in which the family dramas are secretively played out. What best emerges from the novel is Mistry's compassionate sense of the frustrations, temptations and everyday sufferings life imposes on all his characters. All, in the end, resemble one another in the accommodations and compromises they are obliged to make. --Nick Rennison

Review:

"Mistry harks back to the 19th-century novelists. . . . The reader is moved, even to tears." - John Updike, The New Yorker

"[Mistry] needs no infusion of magical realism to vivify the real. The real world, through his eyes, is magical." - The New York Times

"Mistry . . . solidifies his standing as one of the world's finest authors . . . Come to [this book] with the anticipation or foreboding you'd bring to a letter from home. You'll be rewarded luxuriously." - The Seattle Times

"Mistry [is] a giant of a writer. . . . [an] almost perfect example of the storyteller's art." - Chicago Tribune

"Mistry writes with a patient attention to language, structure, and detail reminiscent of. . . .Tolstoy and Tagore... His greatest strength lies in depicting the human heart, in all its longing and imperfection, with unsentimental tenderness." -San Francisco Chronicle

"Worthy of the 19th-century masters." -Time

"Subtle and true . . . His evocation of the streets and sounds of jostling Bombay is almost painfully alive." -New York Review of Books

"Rohinton Mistry is not a household name, but it should be. . . . he ought to be considered simply one of the best writers, Indian or otherwise, now alive. . . . Major writers differ from minor ones. . . in their ability to handle the big questions: death, family, the passing of time, the inevitability of loss, God or the corresponding God-shaped hole. Mistry handles all of them in an accomplished style entirely his own." -The Atlantic

"Mistry's prose is expansive, generous to its characters and ample in story. . . . Frequently clear-eyed, courageous and deeply entertaining."-The Oregonian

"As much a tribute to the spirit of Bombay as it is a portrait of domestic life in modern India. . . . Mistry's quiet sense of humor enlivens the story and makes it a delight to follow." -Baltimore Sun

"Imagine a 19th-century realist sensibility probing the abiding mysteries of India in our time. Leo Tolstoy meets R. K. Narayan. . . . Mistry's compassion for [his] people is boundless." -Newsday

"A wonderfully perceptive and sometimes hilarious exploration of the complexities of family life. . . . A novel of great wisdom, beauty and power-a book to be treasured."-Buffalo News

"Almost Tolstoyan in registry and range . . . To say Mistry captures the textures of India well and creates larger-than-life characters is to note the least of his achievements." -The Observer (London)

"As compelling and rich as either of Mistry's other novels . . . the world in a two-room flat. . . . Mistry depicts the sort of family love that grounds us in the world." -Globe & Mail

"Stealthily, even movingly, Mistry reveals small triumphs of humanity over distaste, minute shifts that signal leaps of compassion." -The Guardian (UK)

"Mistry has created a meticulously evoked, deliberately paced portrait of decay and ruin. . . . It is not a pretty picture, but Mistry makes it warmhearted and stirring all the same." -Time Out New York

About this edition

• Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 037570342X
• ISBN 13: 9780375703423
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 448