This is a hard book to like. I "should" like it. I wanted to like it. But it wasn't a fun read - not that I expected it to be or that it is supposed to be. It was interesting and smart but never compelling. I could easily put it down and not think much about it.

I did not expected much from this book anyways, one thing that really annoyed me was, few chapter did not add anything to the main plot. There are lots of characters that did not fully develope. But all in all this is a well tried plot, gets good in between

Mukherjee is a good writer and held together many complex aspects of a west Bengal family during turbulent times. The problem however is that not only did he hold it together, he probably added 200 pages in a Thoreau wannabe description of the glory of the poor farmer. It's not a bad book, somewhat binding story, but perhaps as a South Asian I'm tired of reading about the tragedy, politics, and cruelty of that region during partition and political turmoil. Perhaps the genre is overplayed.

On balance, an eminently readable book. At its heart, the book talks of the cost of revolution; what it takes to change the world and keep going despite being aware of the futility of it. And how the illusion of being an instrument of change, a part of a grand design, of being invincible because you don't care for even your own life, can be shattered when pain is inflicted. Pain in its purest form can overwhelm everything, it can contain an entire lifetime in its neat clinical folds and reduce it to absolutely nothing in a mere moment. The book runs into 500 pages, could have been a lot slimmer. The story of a dysfunctional family, a family in decay, crushed under its own weight, is something we have read - it has become all too familiar now. But an enquiry into the life and more importantly the mind, of a naxal; one prepared to give up his life, thinking of it as the supreme sacrifice, the ultimate cost, until of course he confronted with the stark reality that dying is very easy, living under pain is difficult; makes this book a good read.

I enjoyed quite a lot of this book. The petty jealousies within the extended family which are amplified as a result of sharing the same house were fascinating, and I particularly enjoyed the character of Chhaya, the daughter who remains unmarried. The hilarious Bette Davis type sarcasm at family gatherings is great fun. However, as others have said, I didn't really care about any of the characters, and although Supratik's letters illustrate the story of the Naxalite rebellion, they don't do a lot in terms of character development (how can we trust this guy's first person account of himself?)

However, the book is irritating in various ways. The Bengali convention of naming of relatives is confusing and leads the reader to skim rather than try and work out each time who is being referred to. (Actually I didn't even realise there was a glossary at the end of the book until about half way through which was irritating in itself - why isn't it either at the beginning of the book or there a clear signpost to it at the beginning? And why aren't all the Bengali words used in the book listed in the glossary - surely if you are providing a glossary at all, they should all be in there. I gave up looking up words when the first two i looked up werent listed.)

Secondly, the structure of the book means that stories about individual characters finish with cliff hangers and then are taken up later in the book. However, rather than take up where one story leaves off, there is often a recap of where the story had got to and then a jump to another bit of the story. I can't see the point in using this technique if you then have to retell the story to help the reader pick it up again. It's unbearable to have to read the same story twice, particularly in a book this long. Paradoxically, this resulted in not only duplication but on other occasions a lack of detail - I really wanted to know what happened to Prio at the end of the brothel chapter, but the end of that particular bit of the story is dismissed in half a line three quarters of the book later.

The last few chapters are just tedious - and I would be very surprised if many people actually read the second to last one. I didn't read either of the appendices which seemed superfluous.

All in all this book needed a much stricter editor. There was just too much of it. I could appreciate the author's range without admiring it. At times the writing seemed indulgent, and I felt I was doing the writer a service rather than the other way round.

Really a painful read, absolutely took ages to finish and had to skim chapters in the end to get there (ironically I still got the gist of the story so I think an edit was required). Too much interchange between characters so whenever you got momentum, it stalled. Took too long to try to bring the story together and in the end I don't think this was achieved. If you want revolutionary writing, stick with A Fine Balance....it keeps heart at the centre.