Where to Start with Rohinton Mistry: A Reading Guide

Rohinton Mistry (born 1952) is the Indian-Canadian novelist who emigrated from Bombay to Toronto in 1975 and became one of the most celebrated novelists of the late twentieth century, with three novels that were each shortlisted for the Booker Prize — a distinction shared by no other author. His fiction is set in Bombay among the Parsi community he came from, and it engages with the specific textures of Indian urban life — the politics, the castes, the religious communities, the bureaucratic violence of the state — with a realism and a compassion that place him in the tradition of Dickens and Tolstoy. A Fine Balance (1995), his masterpiece, is one of the most powerful novels about poverty and political repression in twentieth-century fiction.

Where to Start: A Fine Balance (1995)

The essential Mistry — and one of the most powerful novels about modern India. Set in 1975, during the Emergency declared by Indira Gandhi, the novel follows four characters who share a cramped Bombay apartment: Dina Dalal, a Parsi widow trying to run a tailoring business; Maneck, a student from a mountain town; and two tailors from a low caste, the uncle Om and his nephew Ishvar, who have escaped violence in their village. Their attempts to maintain dignity and friendship against the crushing pressure of poverty, government cruelty, and bad luck form the novel’s long, devastating arc.

The novel is long (the length itself is part of its moral argument — the fullness of the lives it depicts, the accumulation of small cruelties and small kindnesses), and it does not offer comfort. It offers instead the extraordinarily precise rendering of the lives of the poor — their resilience, their humour, their love for each other — and the structural forces that destroy them. His most important work.

Such a Long Journey (1991)

Mistry’s first novel — and the most warmly human of his three. Gustad Noble, a middle-aged Parsi bank employee in Bombay, is trying to hold his family together (a son who has disappointed him, a daughter who is ill, a wife who understands things differently from him), maintain the friendships of his neighbourhood, and protect his small world from the encroachments of a city growing beyond his comprehension. When an old friend asks him to deposit a large sum of money through his account, Gustad is drawn into events connected to the Bangladesh Liberation War.

The novel balances public history (the war, the political corruption) against private life with great skill; it is more optimistic than A Fine Balance and more immediately accessible. The best starting point for readers new to Mistry.

Family Matters (2002)

Mistry’s third novel — following Nariman Vakeel, an elderly Parsi professor in Bombay with Parkinson’s disease, who is being cared for by his stepchildren in increasingly difficult circumstances. When he breaks his ankle, he must move to the cramped apartment of his natural daughter Roxana and her husband Yezad, where the strain of care — the cost, the physical labour, the resentment — tests the family to its limits. Meanwhile Yezad, formerly secular, becomes increasingly drawn to religious observance.

The most intimate and most domestic of Mistry’s novels; his most psychological and his most focused on the family as the unit in which the largest moral dramas are played out.

Reading Rohinton Mistry

Mistry’s fiction is distinguished by an almost Dickensian quality of moral attention to the poor and the marginalised — to the people whom large historical forces (the Emergency, the Bombay development schemes, the caste system) destroy without noticing — combined with a gift for warmly realised characters and the specific textures of Parsi Bombay. His prose is unhurried and classical; he is not interested in formal experimentation but in the fullness of lives rendered in their particularity. Begin with Such a Long Journey for the most accessible and the most immediately engaging; read A Fine Balance for the most powerful and the most complete.