The Lives of Others - Neel Mukherjee

The Ghosh family live in, I'm guessing here, a typical middle-class house in Calcuta, West Bengal. It's 1967. There are seventeen of them plus the servants who occasionally get involved in a good way, one kind soul risks the sack by giving Purba a sneaky stash of Vim. Purba, who is from a poor family and has become a widow with two small children after her husband, the youngest son of the clan, went to the country with his pals and raped a village girl and was battered to death by the local men, lives in the Ghosh basement. She is treated worse than a servant and her bullying mother-in-law expects her to do the dishes traditional style, cleaning them with ashes.

You can guess from this snippet that the author does not shy away from tough issues! Some humour sometimes and bits of friendship, usually outside this family torn by rivalry who often squabble like cats in a sack.There's a great description of Durga Puja, an annual celebration resembling Christmas but more community orientated.

The son who's the family nice guy hangs out with local poets and sets up a small poetry mag. The others see him as a complete waster as he doesn't make any money!

The family business is the paper mill and of course there's 'trouble at mill'. In some ways the whole book reminds me of some of the nineteenth century French novels CM has been reading; the extended family swept along by  tides of time and change could almost be Zola's fictional tribe the Rougons-Macquarts who became an 18 book series.

Because of the era, one son moves stealthily from university to the villages,becoming a leader in the Naxalite rebellion, helping the starving villagers. These parts of the story are interwoven with the family saga and I am catching up on them now. The connection between the two narratives works.

The Lives of Others was shortlisted for this year's Booker. It's a big book and it took me a while to get into it and get involved with the wide spread of characters. I glad I persevered. It's good.