Not sure what to make of this book. It is rated very highly by some but guess I am not literary enough to appreciate it. The story moves back and forth between the present and the past, and across boundaries. It can be quite disorientating because the first part of the book doesn't quite give you a sense of the period that the story takes place. It is only in the second part that things become clearer and you find out what happened, especially to Tridib. ( )

A intervalli regolari di qualche mese, Tridib compare alla porta di casa dei suoi zii e cugini. Le gambe incrociate strette, la fronte coperta di sudore, dopo i necessari convenevoli imposti dall'etichetta, si precipita direttamente nella stanza da bagno, spinto dai capricci del suo apparato digerente, rovinato dai fiumi di tè nero ingollati nei chioschi ai margini delle strade di Calcutta.
Quando ne riemerge, mostra il consueto piglio disinvolto del figlio di un funzionario del Foreign Office abituato agli agi di una spaziosa casa avita. Sprofondato nel divano buono, inizia a dissertare sui più svariati argomenti: le stele mesopotamiche, il jazz dell'Est europeo, i costumi delle scimmie arboricole, il teatro di Garcia Lorca e, soprattutto, l'Inghilterra, abitata da compite fanciulle come la signorina Price.
Incantato, il cugino più piccolo di nove anni non perde una parola delle sue storie fantastiche, delle sue mirabolanti descrizioni di un'Inghilterra leggendaria e lontana. Assorbe a tal punto l'arte di narrare di quel parente bizzarro dal volto magro e stizzoso, dai capelli arruffati e dagli occhi neri che scintillano dietro le lenti cerchiate d'oro, da essere capace lui stesso,

This is my sixth Ghosh, the others being the Ibis trilogy, The Glass Palace and The Hungry Tide. While I didn't enjoy it as much as my favourites, The Hungry Tide and Sea of Poppies, as his second novel it certainly portends his excellent writing to come. The Shadow Lines has as its historical backdrop the Bengali partition and associated violence, but in a way the focus is more on familial relationships, individual personalities, the interaction between British and Indian families linked by their patriarchs. The backdrop really is a backdrop: you won't be learning much history, nor is it necessary to have an interest in this period to appreciate the story. The characters are real, and there are emotional points peppered throughout. The ending, one which marries the political scene with the principal characters, is memorable à la The Hungry Tide.

A favourable review of this novel will praise the lyrical nature of Ghosh's writing, talk about the way in which he elegantly "collapses time and space," and perhaps mention the unobtrusive yet evocative way in which a difficult period of history is addressed. While I agree to an extent, I have a couple of qualms. First, apart from cuisine little distinction is made between the Indian and British families from a cultural perspective. Second, I found the constant time warps and convoluted sentence structures distracting. Here, I give Ghosh the benefit of the doubt ("it's me, not him").

As an example, it took me around six readings to comprehend this sentence:-

"She knew that Robi was quite happy to risk expulsion occasionally by smuggling bottles of rum into his room and drinking the night away with his friends, and because she could not see that he would do those things in college precisely because there was a certain innocence about those exploits in those circumstances, the kind of monasticism that honours the rules of the order in their breach, she could not understand why Robi would feel himself defiled, drinking in a nightclub, surrounded by paunchy men with dark-pouched eyes." ( )

The best book I've ever read. The views on nationality are so clearly explicated. What he meant was the division of nations should be done on the division of notions and culture and lifestyle, not based on the interests and understanding of just a few political bindings. When a few days ago, the people who loved each other and fought against the common foe of colonialism and imperialism in the form o British forces, just because some handful of leaders drew lines, those very people started killing each other in the name of country and religion. The legacy of partition and grief and backwardness and world's most horrid mass emigration was awarded to Indians by Britishers, but it was nationality and specks of Religious insensibility that transferred it into the human hearts. Finally, the people in general who believed in the constraints of Religion, Nationality and Cultural superiority were to be blamed for the 1947 massacre and all further religious riots in India. ( )

I have a tendency to enjoy literature from the Indian subcontinent and this was no exception. Set predominantly in Calcutta in the 1950s and 1960s and partly in England a bit later, and a bit earlier, this novel chronicles the lives of an Indian and an English family. The narrator is very much influenced by his cousin Tridib and his stories as well as the stories of his grandmother and how she grew up in Dhaka (at the time the novel is set, still East Pakistan) and the novel goes backwards and forwards through time relating some of these. In his own life, he tries to be true to the stories that have shaped him but there is always a darker more mysterious past that underlies everything. Essentially this is a book about the long-lasting effects of partition and how the arbitrary border lines changed thousands of peoples lives forever. But I was invested in the characters, I felt sympathy for them and wanted everything to turn out OK for them. There isn't a huge amount of plot, or rather there is, but it goes almost unnoticed until right at the very end so this is mostly a novel in which the language and characters play important roles. I loved it. ( )