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Rohinton Mistry is the only author whose every novel has been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. Such a Long Journey (1991), A Fine Balance (1995) and Family Matters (2002) are all set in India's Parsee community. Recognised as one of the most important contemporary writers of postcolonial literature, Mistry's subtle yet powerful narratives engross general readers, excite critical acclaim and form staple elements of literature courses across the world. This study provides an insight into the key features of Mistry's work. It suggests how the author's writing can be read in terms of recent Indian political history, his native Zoroastrian culture and ethos, and the experience of migration, which now sees him living in Canada. The texts are viewed through the lens of diaspora and minority discourse theories to show how Mistry's writing is illustrative of marginal positions in relation to sanctioned national identities. In addition, Mistry utilises and blends the conventions of oral storytelling common to the Persian and South Asian traditions, with nods in the direction of the canonical figures of modern European literature, sometimes reworking and reinflecting their registers and preoccupations to create a distinctive voice redolent of the hybrid inheritance of Parsee culture and of the postcolonial predicament more generally.
94 Rohinton Mistry 4 Thread and circuses: performing in the spaces of city and nation in A Fine Balance you only have power over people as long as you don’t take everything away from them. But when you’ve robbed a man of everything he’s no longer in your power – he’s free again. (Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The First Circle, p. 107) M you cannot draw lines and compartments, and refuse to budge beyond them … You have to maintain a fine balance between hope and despair … In the end, it’s all a question of balance. (A Fine Balance, p. 231) ISTRY’S interest in the
, carries with him the whiff of scandal and divided loyalties owing to his liaison with a non-Parsi, Lucy Braganza. When his father refuses to countenance his exogamous intentions, Nariman reluctantly yields to the marriage with Yasmin Contractor. Nariman soon adds a daughter of his own, Roxana, to his newly acquired stepchildren, leading to longstanding jealousies and resentment about favouritism. As these almost ad hoc arrangements indicate, families develop, change and some branches die out while others are propagated and flourish. Beyond this, as in A Fine Balance
-war and post-war films are viewed as impov erished or irrelevant. In this way the position sidelines among other works Family Portrait, a film which at the time of its release was praised as a vibrant and creative work. Edgar Anstey, writing in Film Festival: Third Week, a publication of the Edinburgh Film Festival, called Family Portrait the most important documentary produced since the war.3 The Monthly Film Bulletin praised what its reviewer saw as the film’s masterly style and its fine balance of camerawork, editing, voice-over and music.4 The publication Today
Victorian Britain’. 15 Affordable pricing and interactive content, such as the puzzles and other competitions, reveal that readers were not only socially varied but actively participating in a ‘community of reader/writers’. 16 Within this newly proliferating and accessible format, classical antiquity became a powerful example of the fine balance between Victorian pedagogy and entertainment, as well as the inextricable entanglement of adults’ and children's consumerism
Fiction of Bapsi Sidhwa, Rohinton Mistry and Yasmine Gooneratne’, in the Dodiya volume. Writing of A Fine Balance, Viswanath laments that Dina’s newfound ‘economic empowerment’ as the tailors’ employer is short-lived, and ‘the narrative (significantly that of a male), unable to sustain feminist individualism’,20 returns her to her brother’s household. A more careful reading of the novel would presumably have made apparent the fact that the ‘power’ Dina temporarily enjoys is flawed and complicit with a wider network Morey_Mistry_06_Ch6 156 9/6/04, 4:16 pm Critical
consolation. The first novel, Such a Long Journey, asks questions about the trustworthiness of language as communication in a climate of political intrigue and duplicity and, while concluding that the consolations of friendship and loyalty are to be recommended, also acknowledges their temporary nature. A Fine Balance carries these interests onto the battlefield that is the India of Mrs Gandhi’s Emergency, a terrain populated by grimacing henchman and stoical eccentrics whose larger-than-life qualities take the book beyond the realm Morey_Mistry_07_Ch7 171 9/6/04, 4
Identity is often regarded as something that is possessed by individuals, states, and other agents. In this edited collection, identity is explored across a range of approaches and under-explored case studies with a view to making visible its fractured, contingent, and dynamic features. The book brings together themes of belonging and exclusion, identity formation and fragmentation. It also examines how identity functions in discourse, and the effects it produces, both materially and in ideational terms. Taking in case studies from Asia-Pacific, Europe, the Middle East and Latin America, the various chapters interrogate identity through formal governing mechanisms, popular culture and place. These studies demonstrate the complex and fluid nature of identity and identity practices, as well as implications for theorising identity.
The major part of this book project was funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 700913.
This book is about two distinct but related professional cultures in late Soviet
Russia that were concerned with material objects: industrial design and
decorative art. The Russian avant-garde of the 1920s is broadly recognised to
have been Russia’s first truly original contribution to world culture. In
contrast, Soviet design of the post-war period is often dismissed as hackwork
and plagiarism that resulted in a shabby world of commodities. This book
identifies the second historical attempt at creating a powerful alternative to
capitalist commodities in the Cold War era. It offers a new perspective on the
history of Soviet material culture by focusing on the notion of the ‘comradely
object’ as an agent of progressive social relations that state-sponsored Soviet
design inherited from the avant-garde. It introduces a shared history of
domestic objects, handmade as well as machine-made, mass-produced as well as
unique, utilitarian as well as challenging the conventional notion of utility.
Situated at the intersection of intellectual history, social history and
material culture studies, this book elucidates the complexities and
contradictions of Soviet design that echoed international tendencies of the late
twentieth century. The book is addressed to design historians, art historians,
scholars of material culture, historians of Russia and the USSR, as well as
museum and gallery curators, artists and designers, and the broader public
interested in modern aesthetics, art and design, and/or the legacy of socialist
regimes.
://documents-dds-ny.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/G14/031/20/PDF/G1403120.pdf?OpenElement . 7 Ibid ., paragraph 14. 8 S. Wildeman, ‘Protecting rights and building capacities: challenges to global mental health policy in light of the convention on the rights of persons with disabilities’, Journal of Law, Medicine and Ethics , 41:1 (2013), 48–73; S. Wilson, ‘Mental capacity legislation in the UK: Systematic review of the experiences of adults lacking capacity and their carers’, British Journal of Psychiatry Bulletin , 41:5 (2017), 260–6; J. Craigie, ‘A fine