Book Review: A Suitable Boy

Can’t say how much my life changed due to ‘A Suitable Boy’ – In terms of the time spent on it or mustering up the determination to complete the novel

It all started when I went to Crossword a year ago just to check out its sale. I chanced upon this book and bought just coz it was quite cheap for such a big book and the author was well known :P

It was after getting the book home that I realized that what I had in my hands was one of the longest novels (1349 pages) ever written in English Literature!...and I patted myself on the back for that :D

Of course, I didn’t expect myself to read it right away…the pile of books I had to read for my impending project work/ exam had already turned into a mini mountain.

So…finally after all exams, when I knew I had all the time in the world (I did not know till when though) I started reading THE BOOK. After reading about 400 pages, I decided to give a gap for a few days, coz the book’s not a thriller and I wasn’t dying to know what happens next. This gap of a few days soon turned into a gap of a few months…

…until I began reading it again in December 2009.

Through immense determination and giving credit to the book – through the interest that slowly crept on me as I turned the pages, I finally completed reading the novel last Sunday (28th March) !!! (Hurray!)

Btw, while reading this book, I also simultaneously read ‘Tuesdays With Morrie’, ‘One Night at the Call Center’, ‘You Belong To Me’, ‘Blink’ and ‘Freakonomics’ (halfway through).

The pace of the narration is smooth, slow and the book requires patience to read. You can’t just expect something miraculous or incredible or thrilling to happen in a couple of hundred pages. Once you get started, the interest builds-up, but slowly.

The story basically revolves around four families – The Mehras, the Kapoors, the Chatterjis and the Khans. The main story is about how Mrs. Mehra looks for ‘A Suitable Boy’ for her daughter Lata.

There are quite a large number of main protagonists in this story (there are four family trees in the first couple of pages of the book for easy reference) and an even larger number of other ‘side’ characters. Given this, you will never once get confused who is who, related to whom and how…

As I kept reading the novel, I felt the characters come alive, so real, so natural, so very like each one of us…it later becomes quite hard to imagine that those people do not exist, that they are just figments of a person’s imagination.

To tell the truth, somewhere towards the end of the book, I expected something dramatic or a sudden turn of events to take place in one scenario and something totally unexpected happened in another scenario… it’s quite a dumb way of putting it, but it’s hard to tell the story without telling it!!!

In this story, there are no heroes, no marvels, just ordinary people, living ordinary lives, which turn extraordinary under certain circumstances and the lives become temporarily turbulent, but then just as any storm should settle, so do these lives; and then life goes on.

At the end it left me with this feeling…

...that I traveled all alone to an entirely different place and was introduced to these characters such that I knew all of them, but they did not know who I am, I could see them, but they couldn’t see me; something like a spirit…

…and that I watched all what was going on in their lives for a brief period of time, smiled when they were happy and felt their pain, before the author beckoned the spirit and told that it was time to leave.