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    The Shadow Lines
    The Shadow Lines
    The Shadow Lines
    Audiobook10 hours

    The Shadow Lines

    Written by Amitav Ghosh

    Narrated by Raj Varma

    3.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    “A stunning novel” following two families—one British, one Bengali—from the New York Times–bestselling author of Sea of Poppies (The  New Republic).

    Opening in Calcutta in the 1960s, Amitav Ghosh’s radiant second novel follows an English family and a Bengali family as their lives intertwine across the generations in both tragic and comic ways. The narrator, Indian born and English educated, traces events back and forth in time, from the outbreak of World War II to the late twentieth century, through years of Bengali partition and violence—observing the ways in which political events invade private lives—in an “ambitious, funny, poignant” saga (A. K. Ramanujan).

    “Amusing, sad, wise, and truly international in scope.” —The New York Times Book Review

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBrilliance Audio
    Release dateApr 15, 2010
    ISBN9781441835109
    The Shadow Lines
    Author

    Amitav Ghosh

    Amitav Ghosh was born in Calcutta in 1956. He studied at the Doon School; St. Stephens College; Delhi University; Oxford University; and the Faculty of Arts at the University of Alexandria. His first job was at the Indian Express newspaper in New Delhi. He earned his doctorate at Oxford before he wrote his first novel.In February 2004 Amitav Ghosh was appointed Visiting Professor in the Department of English at Harvard University. He is married with two children and lives in New York.

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    Reviews for The Shadow Lines

    3.5/5

    155 ratings9 reviews

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    • 4/5
      Shadow Lines does not have a plot, it is a book of recollections related by the different characters. It is about the meaning of freedoms in the modern world and just how those 'shadow lines' are drawn. It is an interesting read and the message is a strong one - that the world should be a place for peace and harmony. I enjoyed this book very much and I would consider it a must read for all.
    • 3/5
      Dit boek brengt je voortdurend in verwarring, want de auteur springt continu over en weer, zowel in de tijd als in de ruimte. De Indiase stad Calcutta, in de jaren 60 en later, speelt een hoofdrol, maar ook Londen in de jaren ?40, ?n in de jaren 60 en 70. En zeker in het tweede deel wordt er ook naar Dhaka, in Bangladesh overgesprongen. De vertellende ik-figuur is een Indiase jongen die opgroeit in Calcutta en wiens familie uit Bangladesh is gevlucht; er verschijnen grootmoeders, groottantes, ooms en neven en nichten ten tonele, en kennissen in Londen. Pas heel geleidelijk krijg je door dat dit boek eigenlijk gaat over grenzen, ruimtelijke grenzen, maar ook tijdsgrenzen, en dat de boodschap is dat die grenzen maar schaduwlijnen zijn, geen afscheidingen van andere werelden. Wat in Calcutta, Londen of Dhaka gebeurt, heeft voortdurend invloed op elkaar, en gebeurtenissen uit het verleden, en vooral de herinneringen eraan geven vorm aan het heden. Ook de grenzen tussen kolonisator en gekoloniseerde zijn niet scherp te trekken.Ghosh heeft een intrigerend en interessant boek geschreven, een soort van experiment, maar helemaal geslaagd vind ik het niet.
    • 4/5
      This is my sixth Ghosh, the others being the Ibis trilogy, The Glass Palace and The Hungry Tide. While I didn't enjoy it as much as my favourites, The Hungry Tide and Sea of Poppies, as his second novel it certainly portends his excellent writing to come. The Shadow Lines has as its historical backdrop the Bengali partition and associated violence, but in a way the focus is more on familial relationships, individual personalities, the interaction between British and Indian families linked by their patriarchs. The backdrop really is a backdrop: you won't be learning much history, nor is it necessary to have an interest in this period to appreciate the story. The characters are real, and there are emotional points peppered throughout. The ending, one which marries the political scene with the principal characters, is memorable à la The Hungry Tide.A favourable review of this novel will praise the lyrical nature of Ghosh's writing, talk about the way in which he elegantly "collapses time and space," and perhaps mention the unobtrusive yet evocative way in which a difficult period of history is addressed. While I agree to an extent, I have a couple of qualms. First, apart from cuisine little distinction is made between the Indian and British families from a cultural perspective. Second, I found the constant time warps and convoluted sentence structures distracting. Here, I give Ghosh the benefit of the doubt ("it's me, not him").

      As an example, it took me around six readings to comprehend this sentence:-
      She knew that Robi was quite happy to risk expulsion occasionally by smuggling bottles of rum into his room and drinking the night away with his friends, and because she could not see that he would do those things in college precisely because there was a certain innocence about those exploits in those circumstances, the kind of monasticism that honours the rules of the order in their breach, she could not understand why Robi would feel himself defiled, drinking in a nightclub, surrounded by paunchy men with dark-pouched eyes.
    • 5/5
      The best book I've ever read. The views on nationality are so clearly explicated. What he meant was the division of nations should be done on the division of notions and culture and lifestyle, not based on the interests and understanding of just a few political bindings. When a few days ago, the people who loved each other and fought against the common foe of colonialism and imperialism in the form o British forces, just because some handful of leaders drew lines, those very people started killing each other in the name of country and religion. The legacy of partition and grief and backwardness and world's most horrid mass emigration was awarded to Indians by Britishers, but it was nationality and specks of Religious insensibility that transferred it into the human hearts. Finally, the people in general who believed in the constraints of Religion, Nationality and Cultural superiority were to be blamed for the 1947 massacre and all further religious riots in India.
    • 3/5
      Dit boek brengt je voortdurend in verwarring, want de auteur springt continu over en weer, zowel in de tijd als in de ruimte. De Indiase stad Calcutta, in de jaren 60 en later, speelt een hoofdrol, maar ook Londen in de jaren ’40, én in de jaren 60 en 70. En zeker in het tweede deel wordt er ook naar Dhaka, in Bangladesh overgesprongen. De vertellende ik-figuur is een Indiase jongen die opgroeit in Calcutta en wiens familie uit Bangladesh is gevlucht; er verschijnen grootmoeders, groottantes, ooms en neven en nichten ten tonele, en kennissen in Londen. Pas heel geleidelijk krijg je door dat dit boek eigenlijk gaat over grenzen, ruimtelijke grenzen, maar ook tijdsgrenzen, en dat de boodschap is dat die grenzen maar schaduwlijnen zijn, geen afscheidingen van andere werelden. Wat in Calcutta, Londen of Dhaka gebeurt, heeft voortdurend invloed op elkaar, en gebeurtenissen uit het verleden, en vooral de herinneringen eraan geven vorm aan het heden. Ook de grenzen tussen kolonisator en gekoloniseerde zijn niet scherp te trekken.Ghosh heeft een intrigerend en interessant boek geschreven, een soort van experiment, maar helemaal geslaagd vind ik het niet.
    • 2/5
      Last night I was watching an episode of Lost, and as usual with this TV series, I was confused about what was going on. Is this the past? the future? reality or a flashback? And all of a sudden I realized that I have the same muddled confusion over this book. The story is about a Bengali boy and follows his life from a child in Calcutta, through a college education in England and returning home to India. It is definitely set in a turbulent time period, from post World War II, through the India/Pakistan partition, to the late 20th century. I enjoyed many of the issues covered in this book - people getting displaced by Partition, living as a foreigner in another country and racial and religious bigotry. But the style of writing made reading this book feel like work instead of pleasure. The story is told as a young man's reminisence of his past, so some of the jumping around makes sense. But I found Ghosh's sentence structure incredibly difficult to read. Here is a single sentence:

      That wasn't surprising, for my grandmother's contempt for the Sheheb had nothing to do with drink at all, as my father thought: it was founded on the same iron fairness which prompted her, when she became headmistress, to dismiss one of her closest friends - a good-natured but chronically lazy woman - from her job in the school: at bottom she thought the Shaheb was not fit for his job, that he was weak, essentially weak, backbone-less; it was impossible to think of him being firm under threat, of reacting to a difficult or dangerous situation with that controlled, accurate violence which was the quality she prized above all others in men who had to deal with matters of state. pg. 144 OK - that's 9 commas, 2 colons, 1 semi-colon, and 2 dashes. I'm glad I never had to diagram that sentence!
    • 2/5
      Too involved and complicated. After I finished dragging myself through it, I thought maybe it wasn't all that bad.
    • 3/5
      The earliest novel, I guess, and not up to the standards of subsequent ones. Start with The Glass Palace.Too much reheated gruel of England in WW2 and not near enough about the Indian experience. There's a cool detachment. Did he just no know how to depict what had to be tensions and resentment of this white family by the Bangali one? It was an apartheid society, after all. The aunt mentions too briefly a patriotic schoolmate hauled out of class, sentenced, to some prison probably for decades (probably in the remote Andaman islands), as happened to so many teenagers under the British. This is not going to happen to any of the white family.Or to put it another way, this English family was not in any way typical of those in India, but Ghosh doesn't flesh out the how or why.
    • 4/5
      I read this years ago, in a "Bengali Literature: in English and in Translation" class I took. I remember it being very beautifully written and absorbing. A college freshman, I still retained some of my teenage tendency to shun darkness or unpleasantness in stories, but this book's writing drew me in and onward regardless. A rich and rewarding read, as I recall.