The Lives of Others

by Neel Mukherjee

Overview

Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, this “dazzling” (Entertainment Weekly) saga of epic scope is both a family and a political drama.

The aging patriarch and matriarch of the Ghosh family preside over their large household, made up of their five adult children and their respective children, unaware that beneath the barely ruffled surface of their lives the sands are shifting. Each set of family members occupies a floor of the home, in accordance to their standing within the family. Poisonous rivalries between sisters-in-law, destructive secrets, and the implosion of the family business threaten to unravel bonds of kinship as social unrest brews in greater Indian society. This is a moment of turbulence, of inevitable and unstoppable change: the chasm between the generations, and between those who have and those who have not, has never been wider. The eldest grandchild, Supratik, compelled by his idealism, becomes dangerously involved in extremist political activism—an action that further catalyzes the decay of the Ghosh home.

Ambitious, rich, and compassionate, The Lives of Others anatomizes the soul of a nation as it unfolds a family history, at the same time as it questions the nature of political action and the limits of empathy. It is a novel of unflinching power and emotional force.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393351712
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	09/28/2015
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	530
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.20(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Calcutta-born Neel Mukherjee is the author of three acclaimed novels. A State of Freedom was a New York Times Editors’ Choice and The Lives of Others was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. Mukherjee divides his time between London and the US.

Editorial Reviews

"Unfailingly beautiful. . . . Resembles a tone poem in its dazzling orchestration of the crescendo of domestic racket. His eye is as acute as his ear: the physicality of people and objects is delineated with a hyper-aesthetic vividness."

New Statesman - Jane Shilling

"Mukherjee’s scope is vast yet so intimately personal that it’s easy imagine him donning different costumes for the characters as he composes their stories… How he accomplished such a wonderful feat is unknown. What is known is that this novel stands as a literary boon. Short-listed for the Man Booker Prize, its American edition was rushed into print."

Starred review Booklist

"Rich and engrossing. . . . Consistently vivid and well realised."

Sunday Times - Theo Tait

"Searing, savage, and deeply moving: an unforgettably vivid picture of a time of turmoil."

Amitav Ghosh

"A devastating portrayal of a decadent society and the inevitably violent uprising against it. . . . It is ferocious, unsparing, and brutally honest."

Anita Desai

"Very ambitious and very successful. . . . . One of Mukherjee’s great gifts is precisely his capacity to imagine the lives of others. . . . Neel Mukherjee terrifies and delights us simultaneously."

Guardian - A. S. Byatt

"Masterful. . . . His fierce intelligence and sophisticated storytelling combine to produce an unforgettable portrait of one family riven by the forces of history and their own desires."

Daily Telegraph - Patrick Flanery

"Haunting...Mukherjee can recall Tolstoy in his ability to bring to life a diverse and expansive set of characters and to sharply invoke interior worlds…[it’s] a sophisticated meditation on suffering that invites empathy for characters who embrace violent ideologies as a result of injustice without ever vindicating the horrific violence they commit."

New York Times Book Review - Hirsh Sawhney

…The Lives of Others features an old-fashioned syntax, packed with prepositions and laced with anachronisms, that feels surprisingly fresh and bold. Mukherjee can recall Tolstoy in his ability to bring to life a diverse and expansive set of characters and to sharply evoke their interior worlds…The Lives of Others is a sophisticated meditation on suffering that invites empathy for characters who embrace violent ideologies as a result of injustice without ever vindicating the horrific violence they commit. Likewise, it demonstrates how oppressive socio-economic structures brutalize people while showing that brutality can sometimes be random, and its causes ultimately elusive.

The New York Times Book Review - Hirsh Sawhney

★ 10/06/2014
Money corrupts and wealth corrupts absolutely in Mukherjee's (A Life Apart) second novel, shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize—a devastatingly detailed account of a family's downfall amid the political turmoil and social unrest of India in the late 1960s and early '70s. In 1967, five generations of the Ghosh family occupy the four floors of their Calcutta home, from the top floor—where Prafullanath, the patriarch, suffers the indignities of old age; his wife tyrannizes her daughter-in-law; and his eldest son Adinath, responsible for running the overextended family paper business, resides with wife and children—down to street level, where the widow and two children of Prafullanath's youngest son share one small room. Adinath's two brothers and their families, along with their unmarriageable sister, complete the household, while servant Madan supplies unrequited compassion. Supratnik (Adinath's son) escapes to the countryside to sow Maoist rebellion as labor strife, jealousy, vice, and betrayal poisons relationships at home. Mukherjee reveals the unraveling social fabric through interwoven points of view. Powerful evocations of poverty and oppression begin in the prologue, recounting a debt-driven murder-suicide, and do not stop until the last excruciating scenes of police torture. This challenging epic has the scope of a political novel and the humanity of a family saga without sentimentality. Descriptions of a rooftop garden, the wonders of mathematics, and the charm of a secret flirtation offer brief respites from the economic and social injustices of post-independence India. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

"Finely observed."

The New Yorker

"Breathtakingly tense…the force of this journey hits you in waves."

Entertainment Weekly

★ 2014-09-22
The evolution of an upper-class Bengali family in the late 1960s reflects India's political turbulence in this confidently expansive second novel from Mukherjee (A Life Apart, 2010), which has been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize.Like a rolling stone, Mukherjee's nonostentatious epic accrues its weight and mass gradually; it's a three-generational family saga that embraces tensions both micro- and macro-cosmic. The majestic Ghosh family mansion in Calcutta reflects the nation's entrenched economic hierarchy, with the wealthy patriarch, Prafullanath, and his wife, Charubala, on the top floor and the servant classes and spurned family members at the bottom. Prafullanath, once an entrepreneurial genius who built a fortune in the paper-making industry, is now a broken reed, his health ruined, his empire failing after bad investments. On the middle floors of the house live the second and third Ghosh generations, three married sons with their children and a sour spinster daughter, and below them, the disgraced widow of a bad-seed fourth son. The family's history is intricately, nonchronologically narrated in brief episodes that point up the power struggles, petty jealousies, cruelties and sexual attractions among the individual members. Mingled with these episodes are extracts from a diary written by Prafullanath's eldest grandson, Supratik, who has absconded to become a Communist Naxalite guerrilla among the rural poor. Supratik's chapters offer glimpses of the extremes of poverty and corruption in Bengal and of its essential beauties too—the green velvet of the rice paddies, the monsoon rains. But political violence emerges in Supratik's story, matched by union troubles at the Ghosh paper mills. After Supratik's eventual return to the Calcutta household, its unraveling gains pace. Mukherjee closes with two epilogues that offer contrasting views of the consequences. This is an immensely accomplished, steady-handed achievement, Victorian in its solidity, quietly enthralling in its insightful observation of the ties that bind.

Kirkus Reviews