amitav ghosh the shadow lines::What has happened recently in kosovo and in east timor show that answers still evade the questions, which ghosh poses about freedom, about the very real yet nonexisting lines, which divide nations, people, and families amitav ghosh the shadow lines

amitav ghosh the shadow lines::What has happened recently in kosovo and in east timor show that answers still evade the questions, which ghosh poses about freedom, about the very real yet nonexisting lines, which divide nations, people, and families.
Before that stage arrives the reader is catapulted to different places and times at breath taking tempo.
The past, present and future combine and melt together erasing any kind of line of demarcation.
Such lines are present mainly in the shadows they cast.
There is no point of reference to hold on to.
Thus the going away the title of the first section of the novel becomes coming home the title of the second section.
These two titles could easily have been exchanged.
The very soul of the happenings, he is the comma which separates yet connects the various clauses of life lived in calcutta, london, dhaka and elsewhere.
The story starts about thirteen years before the birth of the narrator and ends on the night preceding his departure from london back to delhi.
He spends less than a year in london, researching for his doctorate work, but it is a london he knew very well even before he puts a step on its pavements.
Price, her daughter may, and son nick.
Like london comes alive due to the stories related by ila and tridib, dhaka comes alive because of all the stories of her childhood told to him by his incomparable grandmother who was born there.
But the specialty of this novel is that this violence is very subtle till almost the end.
When violence is dealt with, the idea is not to describe it explicitly like a voyeur but to look at it to comprehend its total senselessness.
All i could have told them was of the sound of voices running past the walls of my school, and of a glimpse of a mob in park circus.
Ghosh is also a humorous writer.
It is serious humor.
I specially love the grandmother.
She is the grandmother many of us recognize.
In her fierce moral standards, spartan outlook of life, and intolerance of any nonsense real and imagined, she is as real as any patriarch or matriarch worth the name.
And there is this very loveable character of the narrator.
It is that of a boy who warms your heart, it is that of a man who knows and has lost love more than once in his life and thus makes you feel like hugging him close to your heart.
Some of the most important questions the novel probes are the various faces of violence and the extent to which its fiery arms reach under the guise of fighting for freedom.
What has happened recently in kosovo and in east timor show that answers still evade the modern world.