The Hungry Tide

Starred review from February 14, 2005
A starred review indicates a book of outstanding quality. A review with a blue-tinted title indicates a book of unusual commercial interest that hasn't received a starred review.

THE HUNGRY TIDE
Amitav Ghosh
. Houghton Mifflin
, $25 (352p) ISBN 0-618-32997-8

One doesn't so much read Ghosh's masterful fifth novel as inhabit his characters and the alluring if treacherous Sundarban archipelago, "the ragged fringe of sari," where it is set. The author's nuanced descriptions of the moods and microenvironments of the islands serve as a lush backdrop for an intricate narrative that moves fluidly between past and present. Hoping to make her mark in the cetological world, Piyali Roy, an Indian-American marine biologist, travels across the Sundarbans in search of the once plentiful Irrawaddy dolphin. Piyali befriends both an illiterate fisherman, Fokir, who leads her to a dolphin-rich river enclave, and a successful interpreter, Kanai Dutt, who has arrived in the region from New Delhi to retrieve his deceased uncle Nirmal's journal. Through Nirmal, a Rilke-quoting former school headmaster and erstwhile revolutionary, Ghosh recounts the history of the islands with an unsentimental melancholy. Nirmal's account of the true story of the 1979 siege of Morichjhapi, in which destitute squatters were brutally evicted by the Indian government in order to preserve a wildlife sanctuary, poignantly displays the author's gift for traversing the fiction/nonfiction boundary. Ghosh (The Glass Palace
, etc.), however, is uninterested in setting up simple good/evil binaries and instead weds the issues of love, language and land to the unfolding relationships among Piyali, Fokir and Kanai. The philosophical and moral implications of their actions remain simmering just below the surface. The climactic ending, in which a cyclone threatens the inhabitants of the Sundarbans, underscores Nirmal's observation that "nothing escapes the maw of the tides." Agent, Barney Karpfinger. (May)

Forecast:
Following Ghosh's international bestseller
The Glass Palace and set in a region of India recently much in the news because of the tsunami, this should do very well as the author's first title for Houghton Mifflin. Eight-city author tour; foreign rights sold in 12 countries.

Starred review from June 6, 2005
Audio reviews reflect PW
's assessment of the audio adaptation of a book and should be quoted only in reference to the audio version.
Fiction
The Hungry Tide
Amitav Ghosh
, read by Firdous Bamji. Recorded Books
, unabridged, 14 CDs, 15.75 hrs., $39.99 ISBN 1-4193-3694-0

One of the great delights of reading a novel by the likes of Ghosh or Salman Rushdie is imagining their dialogue emerging in the mellifluous tones of the Indian-accented English spoken by their characters. In this audiobook, narrator Bamji accomplishes that task with skill, credibly rendering the lilting flavor of subcontinental English and reveling in the musicality of Ghosh's tale, set in a remote sector of India. Bamji invests most of his resources into the rich, ringing cadences of Kanai, the translator and intellectual at the heart of the book. Kanai, a striver looking to pull himself up by his bootstraps, possesses a certain comic charm, and Bamji embraces the role with panache. He also alternates smoothly between Kanai's dulcet tones and the flatness of Indian-American scientist Piyali, who encounters Kanai by chance when traveling to investigate Indian marine life. Ghosh's book evocatively imagines an India poised between past and present, and Bamji brings out the enormous range of voices clamoring for attention in this unfamiliar setting. Simultaneous release with the Houghton Mifflin hardcover (Reviews, Feb. 14).