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A review by caterinaanna
An Obedient Father by Akhil Sharma
2.0
Why is this on the 1001 list? Is it because it is set in India but not of India, dealing with a difficult subject that crosses cultures and continents? Or because it does so having been written by somebody living and working in the west, so we get to hear about it? I don't know, but [a:Rohinton Mistry|3539|Rohinton Mistry|http://photo.goodreads.com/authors/1238081582p2/3539.jpg] ticks all the same boxes, writes a lot better and has characters that one can actually love.
I'm afraid that, in spite of Sharma's attempts to paint Karan sympathetically, I couldn't feel pity for him, even when he was faced with Anita's revenge. Oh I could see that there were things that made his life difficult and he was, as Heaven-Ali puts it, more pathetic than evil, but that was not enough. Similarly, although it's easy to see how Anita's powerlessness led to her becoming so hard, I couldn't rejoice when she began to get the upper hand. And that, in the end, was the main problem: there was no-one in the book I could care about - even Asha left me cold - and therefore it was like reading an extended newspaper account of an interesting set of cases.
I'm afraid that, in spite of Sharma's attempts to paint Karan sympathetically, I couldn't feel pity for him, even when he was faced with Anita's revenge. Oh I could see that there were things that made his life difficult and he was, as Heaven-Ali puts it, more pathetic than evil, but that was not enough. Similarly, although it's easy to see how Anita's powerlessness led to her becoming so hard, I couldn't rejoice when she began to get the upper hand. And that, in the end, was the main problem: there was no-one in the book I could care about - even Asha left me cold - and therefore it was like reading an extended newspaper account of an interesting set of cases.