The Shadow Lines

The return of this asymmetrical Saturday was one of those little events, internal, local, almost civic, which, in peaceful lives and closed societies, create a sort of national bond and become the favorite theme of conversations, jokes, stories wantonly exaggerated: it would have been the ready-made nucleus for a cycle of legends, if one of us had had an epic turn of mind.~ Marcel ProustThe Shadow Lines of History (& Geography)It is said that childhood is the font of all stories. No story ca [...]

This was an amazing book that left me blown away by the beautiful vivid storytelling, the insightful analytical commentary and the thought provoking message of the book. The book collapses time and space, placing events from different times and places next to each other. The narrator goes from his experience as a little boy in India to London both through the stories of his uncle and his own experience there as a student. From this narrative structure emerges a powerful message.For Ghosh, the wo [...]

“What had they felt, I wondered, when they discovered that they had created not a separation, but a yet-undiscovered irony . . . the simple fact that there had never been a moment in the four-thousand-year-old history of that map, when the places we know as Dhaka and Calcutta were more closely bound to each other than after they had drawn their lines – so closely that I, in Calcutta, had only to look into the mirror to be in Dhaka; a moment when each city was the inverted image of the other, [...]

The Shadow Lines by Amitav Ghosh4 StarsOn its surface, Shady Lines is about two families – one English and one Bengali – whose lives have been intertwined for three generations. The unnamed narrator, Indian born and English educated, has grown up with the stories of his uncle, Tridib. It is through these seemingly unrelated stories that the larger picture slowly unfold until, eventually, you realize that they are all culminating in a single, tragic event that impacts both families.Ultimately [...]

Amitav Ghosh is one of my favourite authors, so it was really interesting for me to see how different this early novel is, to the later ones of his I have read. The writing is as sublime as I've come to expect, but where The Shadow Lines is quite unique is in the way the story is told. This is in fact a story about telling stories, written in the style of a series of stories from the point of view of the story-teller. Confusing? Yes, but kind of brilliant. It was almost accordian-like at times ( [...]

There are some books that are difficult to review. Their pages open up to spill a mixed bag of emotions and self-contained little worlds onto your lap. As the pages whirl by, boundaries blur. And the worlds, with their bags of emotions, seep into your veins, absorbed into the sponge of your sub-conscious. That's when you realize the book is now a part of you - that there was something so compatible between your mind, your feelings and the book that there are no separate entities now. And you bec [...]

all I would like to say about this one is thatyou know the book is actually good when it completely devastates youyou know it has served its purpose when it makes you question everything that you think you think you had known."And then I think to myself why don't they draw thousands of little lines through the whole sub continent and give every little place a new name? What would it change? It's a mirage;the whole thing is a mirage.How can anyone divide a memory ?"

I think this is the perfect book. It isn't a novel. It is something beyond what words can comprehend. Our lives are made up of memories. Maybe proper, maybe improper. This is a live example of that. The strange yet a unique and beautiful way of narration makes the story much more intriguing. It literally goes beyond time and space to build an exquisite stockpile of emotions. A person doesn't read this book, he feels it. There have been very few books in which I didn't skim through some parts whi [...]

This is a book about people and places and the connections between them. For me, the most poignant parts of the book are the times when the narrator contemplates the meaning of maps and borders, or the difficulty of rendering meaning to violence with language. There are love stories in the book, and sex, and politics. A moving read, if not a happy one.This is a book that you will want to read in one sitting. I didn't, but I wish that I had. The book follows the memories of the narrator, and like [...]

stark dark depressing heavy to digest need time to ruminate before I write anything further .

This book was recommended to me by a friend who had simply loved it. She claimed the book to be one that was meant to be read several times, with each reading rendering a deeper understanding and probably a different interpretation. I was naturally curious and wanted to see what she meant by that statement. With that in mind, I promised to read it with her and discuss it. Of course, I was really lazy and never got around to reading it, until today. As I sit to review this book, the first thought [...]

I'm having a hard time figuring out what to say about this. The description and some of the reviews say this is, on the surface, a story of two families - one Indian, one English. I found it only the story of the Indian family who happened to know the white English family and who occasionally spent time with one or other of them. By that I mean that the Indian family sometimes interacted just with themselves, but the white family members interacted only with the Indian family members, rather tha [...]

Last night I was watching an episode of Lost, and as usual with this TV series, I was confused about what was going on. Is this the past? the future? reality or a flashback? And all of a sudden I realized that I have the same muddled confusion over this book. The story is about a Bengali boy and follows his life from a child in Calcutta, through a college education in England and returning home to India. It is definitely set in a turbulent time period, from post World War II, through the India/P [...]

UGH. I'm so annoyed at this book.It's really got some illustrative descriptions of the Subcontinent. The dialogue syntax is weird, but kind of neat - there are no quotation marks. And the story isn't really anything close to linear. But even though it's got this weird layout, I've found myself going through it at a pretty reasonable clip.*SPOILER (yet not terribly tied to the story, wtf?)*Still, I'm pissed off that I've spent 158 pages on it just to find out that the main character is an attempt [...]

The Shadow Lines is one of Ghosh's earlier books, which speaks of the early brilliance of this author. At the start, the reader is drawn into what appears to be a family history, but the history quickly becomes disjointed and erratic, the time of telling jumping decades ahead, turning the corner into a new story, spinning back, a chapter ending before it has begun! But if you persist, you become aware of a rhythm, a poetic telling of a tale from the past, the present and the future (you are some [...]

I really wanted to like this book. There are some great observations from a child's point of view. There are also some real sentiments from the elderly grandmother teacher. ButI easily put this book down to watch tv, talk to my cat, tweeze my eye brows or anything else. The narrator /main character tells his story in a haphazard fashion, not stream of consciousness. Either I couldn't follow him or I didn't care enough to try. I thought it would be nice to read about a middle class Indian for a c [...]

I must agree with Sandybanks review, the plot is quite confusing and the only engrossing character is the grand-mother who plays the main role in this narrative.

this book wasn't bad, it was just that to me it read more like a draft than a finished novel. amitav ghosh is clearly a gifted writer and the book read beautifully at times, but his narrative voice and the presentation of themes could have been stronger. the expanse of time and distance within the brief novel would have been manageable if it had been handled a little bit more adeptly, but often the year and location of the action would change rather abruptly leaving you confused for a few pages [...]

Yet another book which I think ought to be made mandatory reading at the school level, especially now when so many seem to think that nationalism and nationality are black and white ideas, too rigid to accommodate blurred lines or gray areas. As an added bonus, we might finally teach students from a fairly early stage to see how history is always an act of selective forgetting and that how importance is given to events in history is largely determined by who is retelling history and to whom. Per [...]

I don't exactly understand what was it that I loved about this book. It's so simple yet lyrical, muffled but engaging - from first page to last it's just absolutely lovely. It reads like a collection of snapshots from different time frames pieced together which transcends space, time, identity, culture and distance through its fluid narration. It was a journey through the unnamed narrator's mind who isn't trying to get to a truth but in that process reveals the greatest one - that there is no tr [...]

Amitav Ghosh's second novel is as beautifully written as his other novels, but the narrative, especially in the first part, somehow lacks cohesiveness. It reads more like the disjointed memoir of a precocious Calcutta schoolboy than a finished novel, endlessly flipping between different eras, sometimes disorientingly so. The grandmother is the most realized character in the novel, the only character who has seen it all, and whose presence holds together the different narratives. The book ends wi [...]

In my opinion the story didn't interest me, the storytelling did. The style was quite experimental to move back and forth in space and time. But otherwise the base story was in a way predictable and neither interesting nor enlightening.

I've delayed a few days to think before writing about The Shadow Lines. It had similarities at least on the surface to other novels by Indian writers I've read, such as A Fine Balance by Mistry and The God of Small Things by A Roy. It's the story of an Indian family as well as some Brits they know in the mid to late 20th century- the main character is followed over about 20 years and spends time in England on at least one occasion. I had trouble tracking who was who for much of the 1st half- I d [...]

The Shadow Line is the second novel by Indian author, Amitav Ghosh. It is set in Calcutta, London and Dhaka, and tells the story of a Bengali and an English family and their involvement over some eighty years. Told as seen through the eyes of the narrator, whose name we never learn (perhaps this says something of his place in the story: to observe), the story opens in 1960 when he is just eight years old, and traces events that impacted on the family from the start of World War II to the late 19 [...]

What should I say, The Shadow lines is a healthy sort of a book, like it has a healthy theme, good English, good sentences, good flow of story, mixing & merging of events, perfectly decent characters happily meeting & parting with each other and their intricate relationships smoothly knit. It gives you a first party narration but with a third party perspective of a neutral observer who lets the events unfold being part of them but not influencing them. The author goes deep enough in the [...]

Reading this book is rather upsetting: the author continuously jumps back and forward, in time and in space, and after 50 pages you're really confused. The Indian city of Calcutta, in the 1960's and afterwards is the main stage, but also London in 1940 and in the sixties, and in the second part also Dhaka in Bangladesh are places of interest in this novel. The story-telling "I" seems to be an Indian boy, growing up in Calcutta; his family has fled from Eastern Pakistan, after the partition (1948 [...]

I had really mixed feelings about The Shadow Lines. On the one hand it is a brilliantly written novel, which interweaves a number of stories and characters effortlessly. On the other hand I found the latter half of the novel really hard finish. I think the reason I found the second half of the novel so difficult was that for the first half I had been anticipating that something big was round the corner and was bound to happen and any minute and it never did. As I continued the realisation hit me [...]

This is my first book by Ghosh, despite The Glass Palace being on my wish list for years. I found the jumping back and forth (coming and going) intriguing. Sometimes the circumstances under which a book is read really affect the way one thinks about it. I read this quickly, over Christmas, in a couple of days, so the characters were fresh in my mind when I returned to it each time. It is set roughly at the same time and place as A Suitable Boy, so it was an interesting contrast in style. The the [...]

As usual a huge swell of nostalgia sweeps over me when I read Amitav Ghosh and threatens to drown me. Through his books I walk through the streets of Calcutta, the city of my birth. His delicate strokes of color paint such beautiful portraits of personality and disposition that I want to shout, "I know her!" How did you describe her foibles, her oddities so precisely. The story takes place in London and Calcutta at a time just before I was born, and describes events I've heard my parents talk ab [...]

I didn't really get this book. Set on different time levels, in Calcutta and London, it speaks of two families, one Indian and one English. The narrator, a boy belonging to the Indian family, tells the readers about his childhood in Calcutta, his grandmother and her family, Partition, his cousin Ila, with whom he is secretly in love, his university days in London and so on. Some descriptions were quite good, but on the whole I couldn't really grasp any focus or meaning in this novel. And I could [...]