Book Review - Family Matters by Rohinton Mistry

Family Matters by Rohinton Mistry
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Brilliant! A beautifully crafted, poignant story of down-and-out Parsis in Bombay. It is about the helplessness of old age, family love, family strife, ethics, coming of age, religion both as a savior and as a tool for fundamentalists etc. The lyrical prose describing the city:

Time passed as he stood on the balcony and saw the clouds assume the colour of the evening. The setting sun was painting copper edges around them. He looked at the chaos of television cables and radio antennae and electrical connections and telephone lines spread out against the sky. Fitting, he thought, for a city that was chaos personified. This mad confusion of wires, criss-crossing between buildings, haphazardly spanning the road, looping crazily around trees, climbing drunkenly to rooftops – this mad confusion of wires, criss-crossing between buildings, haphazardly spanning the road, looping crazily around trees, climbing drunkenly to rooftops – this mad confusion seemed to have trapped the neighbourhood in its web.

A moment of beauty in the midst of insurmountable difficulties:

The balcony door framed the scene: nine-year-old happily feeding seventy-nine…She felt she was witnessing something almost sacred, and her eyes refused to relinquish the precious moment, for she knew instinctively that it would become a memory to cherish, to recall in difficult times when she needed strength.

The optimist always see the glass as half-full and not half-empty:

But the sources of pleasure are many. Ditches, potholes, traffic cannot extinguish all the joys of life.

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