Volume 49, Number 16 · October 24, 2002
Passage to Bombay
By Pico Iyer
Family Matters
by Rohinton Mistry
Knopf, 434 pp., $26.00
Rohinton Mistry writes what could be called neorealist novels, in honor of the simple, moving tales of struggle and affliction that distinguished the Italian films of the early Fifties (and continue to this day in, say, the films coming out of revolutionary Iran). Though Mistry has lived in Toronto since 1975, when he emigrated from India at the age of twenty-three and began working in a bank, all his four books are all set in a Bombay that he recreates and agonizes over with the close attention to detail of a homesick exile. Unlike many of the writers of the South Asian diaspora, he doesn't engage in manic polemics or god-filled flights of fancy; instead, his stories are careful, patient accounts of people trying to find answers in a world that seldom offers any. Reading him, you are less in the company of Salman Rushdie or Arundhati Roy than in that of Victor Hugo, perhaps, or Thomas Hardy.
Review, 3152 words
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