A review by maketeaa
The Lives of Others by Neel Mukherjee

challenging dark tense slow-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? It's complicated
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

this was, at times, extremely difficult to read. i found myself skipping lines that were too visceral, too gruesome to look at head-on, which is interesting to have experienced in a story whose main actors are a middle class bengali family and the complex dynamics between them. the lives of an others is, in a complicated, tangled way, about exactly what it says on the tin -- the way our lives interact with the lives of others, the way they are constantly spurned, evaluated, compared with the lives of others, but most importantly, how every impression that the lives of others truly matter to us is an illusion for the truth: that, at the end of the day, the lives of others we give importance to only matter insofar they revolve around our own. we see characters such as chhaya, who clings possessively to her older brother as a source of ownership, of a sense of belonging disguised as love, and how her snide remarks and manipulative behaviour are crafted to keep her at the centre of power in her own consciousness. we see charubala, the mother in law of the house, who carefully maintains outward appearances of the ghosh family and sweeps under the rug all that could malign them. and, separated from the main household, we see supratik, a revolutionary, committing terrorist attacks against his class enemies and opposing the middle-class culture he had come from. but the bleak ending serves to show that underlying such attachments to the lives of others, whether good or bad, is the desire to affirm our own, and that loyalty, to ideologies or people alike, only sustain as long as they serve our own deep rooted interests. 
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