Paperback, 352 pages
English language
Published June 7, 2006 by Mariner Books.
Off the easternmost corner of India, in the Bay of Bengal, lies the immense labyrinth of tiny islands known as the Sundarbans, where settlers live in fear of drowning tides and man-eating tigers. Piya Roy, a young American marine biologist of Indian descent, arrives in this lush, treacherous landscape in search of a rare species of river dolphin and enlists the aid of a local fisherman and a translator. Together the three of them launch into the elaborate backwaters, drawn unawares into the powerful political undercurrents of this isolated corner of the world that exact a personal toll as fierce as the tides.
Riveting exploration of selfishness and idealism and loss, set deep in the strange tidal mangroves shifting landscape of rivers and migrations of people and animals.
There are a couple scenes in here that so perfectly eviscerate our character's self-conceptions as good people in just a few lines, and then let them still be complicated and interdependent as the sense of morality too ebbs and washes.
part of my seminar reading on ecocritical postcolonialism, and very well-selected i think, since Ghosh manages to deftly represent the intertwining of themes including migration, environmental preservation/degradation/balance, tensions between ways of knowing (science vs. local oral history), urban development etc.
Ended up really liking this book, but was struggling with it in the middle, because it provides a really good example of a work of fiction where the passages that were entirely in italics could have been ignored or excised entirely from the story. What is it about songs, epistolary writing, etc. that seems to give novelists permission to write badly and at length where they otherwise do not?
