The Romantics [Kindle Edition]

There is none of the intense heat, colour, noise, and passion usually assoicated with Indian novels in this book. Shrouded in fatilism the narrator drifts aimlessly and naively into a futile love affair. So frustratingly cool and calm is he you feel he's in need of a good night out. Mishra's softly undulating prose floats the reader through the novel on a mellow cloud of curiosity. The characters may be going nowhere but this is a successful beginning for Mishra full of promise and I look forward to his next novel.

Samar is a 20 year old student in 1989. He arrives in Benares, "the Oxford of the East", where he hopes to study and spend his time with his favourite books. He is a shy young man who does not enjoy the casual display of personality at social gatherings. The superficial amiability and the light chatter make him feel uncomfortable and he doesn't enjoy taking part in conversations, afraid to say the wrong thing and not quite sure what the right thing to say is. He grew up alone and therefore developed no skills for intimacy or even friendship which he feels requires a degree of self-abnegation from him.
However after meeting several characters like Miss West, Rajesh - a fellow student who turns out to be a criminal - and Catherine, Samar slowly realises that socialising allows him to discover a whole new world. It is particularly his love affair with Catherine which he experiences as a strong emotional turmoil. It is understandable since Samar grew up in a culture where men and women are ushered into marriage after parents have convinced each other about their respective social and financial status. Love is supposed to follow marriage and not the other way round and it doesn't matter much if it doesn't...
An interesting tale of a young provincial man who struggles to make sense of a strange and alien cosmopolitan world. The descriptions of Pondicherry, Allahabad, Benares, Dharamshala and the Himalayas are lyrical and the reader is constantly reminded of the bewitching power of India.

This is an astounding book which is very unlikely to disappoint, unless you have picked it up thinking that it is a love story rather than a literary novel. Its an exciting "first novel" as praise-worthy as other debuts such as Arundhati Roy and Zadie Smith, although Mishra is undoubtedly more serious and reflective. This autobiographical work is steeped in introspection, self-examination and a very personal exploration executed through the eyes of Samar, a "bookish" character with whom readers will instantly identify. A fascinating tool used by Mishra is the idea of displacement as a counterpart to exploration. He makes each of his characters alien to their world - and this is very much at the core of the beauty of the book. Samar himself is an Indian in India, but his world and his experiences are more alien to him than the European characters in the book who come "seeking" to Samar's country.

Only the prose lets Mishra down. When he gets it right he is unrivalled in brilliance, subtlety and aptness, but when he gets it wrong it jars - every 10 or so pages. Neverthelss, reading the novel was a joy and it left me wanting to read it again to enjoy its subtle development in more detail. Of special delight was the very last page and a half on which hang an overwhelming mix of emotions that are in themselves the culmination of the book and the justification for its existence. They are the "romantic" emotions that can not be felt in real life, and can not be described in a review. They will be found nowhere else other than at the end of the journey of these 270 pages and when a novel manages to pull of a feat like this it is a reminder to us of why we read and why we hold literature in such high esteem