A State of Freedom: A Novel

by Neel Mukherjee

Overview

A New York Times Notable Book of 2018

A devastating novel of multiple narratives, “a mark of Neel Mukherjee’s range and force and ambition” (New York Times Book Review).

A State of Freedom wrests open the central, defining events of our century: displacement and migration. Five characters, in very different circumstances—from a domestic cook in Mumbai to a vagrant and his dancing bear—find out the meanings of dislocation and the desire to get more out of life.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393356694
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	02/05/2019
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.30(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Neel Mukherjee is the author of four novels, including The Lives of Others, shortlisted for the Booker Prize. He divides his time between London, England, and Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Editorial Reviews

"[Mukherjee’s] writing is simply gorgeous.… A State of Freedom is a marvel of a book, shocking and beautiful, and it proves that Mukherjee is one of the most original and talented authors working today."— NPR

"The most astonishing and brilliant novel I have read in a long, long time."— Hanya Yanagihara

"Mukherjee looks straight at the ugliest parts of an unequal society and uses what he finds to construct something beautiful."— Harper’s

"Neel Mukherjee has a genius for storytelling.… [He’s] a writer of abundant gifts."— Seattle Times

"Many of the sections are sprinkled with otherworldly moments and spectral figures, so that these narratives read almost like ghost stories, while others are rooted firmly in the achingly realistic, unequal, and unjust soil of modern day India."— Boston Globe

"Experimental.… The characters are connected less by the slender narrative thread than by their acute awareness of inequity."— The New Yorker

"A writer who can envelop you in the worlds he creates, and whose piercing eye for detail can send you reeling.… [Mukherjee] seeds his tales with images of unexpected beauty… an extraordinary account of the tenacious will to survive."— The Times

"Dostoevsky-like in its juxtaposition of unbearable cruelty with an equally unbearable yearning for security and love.… [A State of Freedom is] a powerful, memorable treatment of a theme too often reduced to uninvolving didacticism."— Sunday Times

"His best work yet.… This bleak and entirely justified vision of modern India is what binds together Mukherjee’s stories and indeed his oeuvre."— Financial Times

"Uniquely suited to depicting the operation of fate and coincidence, and to showing relationships and characters from a variety of angles.… Unsparing."— Newsday

From the Publisher

★ 2017-10-11
Five diverse lives in India are traced and linked, exposing the aching gulfs in experience and opportunity that exist in a complex nation.Particle physicists, Maoist terrorists, punitive employers, servants, and émigrés all have roles in Mukherjee's (The Lives of Others, 2014, etc.) third novel, which is composed of interwoven short fictions moving between seething cities and rural life at its most impoverished. Themes of money, work, politics, survival, and women's roles connect the characters. In Bombay, an elderly couple with a new cook welcomes home their liberal son, now living overseas, on his annual visit. His keen interest in food and research for a cookbook lead to awkward efforts to befriend the cook, resulting in a visit to her family's home, a trip seamed with shame, pity, and wonder. Elsewhere, a poor villager, crushed under the burden of trying to provide not only for his own family, but his brother's, too—the brother has gone to find work on construction sites in the cities—is relieved, perhaps, by the discovery of a bear cub. Having trained the bear to "dance"—an unbearably cruel process—man and animal begin a life together on the road and a kind of parallel existence, begging for food and money, debased and suffering. The fate of the absent brother is glimpsed in the sinister, haunting opening of the book and confirmed in its final section. The London-based Mukherjee surprises once again with the form of his storytelling while confirming anew the depth of his empathy. His characters' life journeys are often painful while his descriptions of their circumstances are unsentimental, vivid, unsparing. Above all there is compassion here, alongside a focus that depicts gross inequities with a grim tenderness.A calm, compelling, unshrinking portrait of humanity in transition; both disturbing and dazzling.

Kirkus Reviews