"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."
"[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."
"Mukherjee looks straight at the ugliest parts of an unequal society and uses what he finds to construct something beautiful."
"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."
"Uniquely suited to depicting the operation of fate and coincidence, and to showing relationships and characters from a variety of angles.… Unsparing."
"The most astonishing and brilliant novel I have read in a long, long time."
"Neel Mukherjee has a genius for storytelling.… [He’s] a writer of abundant gifts."
"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."
"His best work yet.… This bleak and entirely justified vision of modern India is what binds together Mukherjee’s stories and indeed his oeuvre."
"Experimental.… The characters are connected less by the slender narrative thread than by their acute awareness of inequity."
Modern India is a place full of people teeming with ambitions, and narrator Sartaj Garewal brings them to life in Mukherjee's linked short stories. Garewal’s narration depicts a range of people and places: fathers and sons, drivers and riders. Garewal maintains his enthusiasm across the wide range of characters who struggle to achieve their private dreams. At times, his delivery choices can overwhelm the listener; for example, when he's portraying young children or pushy beggars, their high-pitched tones come across as overdone. But a feeling of being overwhelmed can be part of visiting one of the world's most populous nations, so perhaps this is a fitting approach to Mukherjee’s slice-of-life exploration of India. M.R. © AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine
Modern India is a place full of people teeming with ambitions, and narrator Sartaj Garewal brings them to life in Mukherjee's linked short stories. Garewal’s narration depicts a range of people and places: fathers and sons, drivers and riders. Garewal maintains his enthusiasm across the wide range of characters who struggle to achieve their private dreams. At times, his delivery choices can overwhelm the listener; for example, when he's portraying young children or pushy beggars, their high-pitched tones come across as overdone. But a feeling of being overwhelmed can be part of visiting one of the world's most populous nations, so perhaps this is a fitting approach to Mukherjee’s slice-of-life exploration of India. M.R. © AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine
★ 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.
