A
Literary Saloon
&
Site of Review.

Trying to meet all your book preview and review needs.

Contents:

Main

the Best

the Rest

Review Index

Links

to e-mail us:


support the site

the complete review - fiction

Ghachar Ghochar

by
Vivek Shanbhag

general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author

- Return to top of the page -

Our Assessment:

B+ : well-observed, compact family tale

See our review for fuller assessment.

  From the Reviews:

• "What could’ve been another admonitory tale is elevated by an emphasis on minutia (.....) It occasionally comes at the cost of a clear narrative, but is a minor point when the writing has moments of wonderfully dark, often unexpected, cynicism." - Dan Einav, Financial Times
  
  
• "The opening chapter demonstrates how the short novel is the perfect form for Shanbhag’s particular talents: precise observations, accumulation of detail, narrative progression by way of oblique tangents. (...) Srinath Perur’s excellent translation presents a wonderfully measured, sometimes mannered diction" - Deborah Smith, The Guardian
  
  
• "Little in Ghachar Ghochar is as it first seems. At well under 30,000 words, the book is liable to be considered a novella, but it has the scope and ambition of a novel rather than a long story. Its concision is a function of how much Vivek Shanbhag leaves unsaid, and how much is suggested or implied. (...) This is a superb novel, unsettling and even claustrophobic, as hermetically enclosed as the family it describes. Shanbhag can be brutally unsentimental, but also moving and genuinely funny. Srinath Perur’s translation is fluent and often elegant, occasional infelicities notwithstanding" - Keshava Guha, The Hindu
  
  
• "Serious readers will appreciate the author’s ability to tell so much by eliminating, his skill at dialogue and the spare prose. The deceptively simple story line and language, along with the book’s 28,000-word length, should make even a non-reader feel right at home." - Prajwal Parajuly, Hindustan Times
  
  
• "Brevity serves Shanbhag’s storytelling to great effect, not least because much of what makes the narrative so gripping lies in what he leaves unsaid. (...) Shanbhag is the real deal, this gem of a novel resounding with chilling truths." - Lucy Scholes, The Independent
  
  
• "This is a novel with a lightness of touch rarely found in our fiction. It is short, and the narrative is suffused with a gentle irony, with an undercurrent of pathos and humour enlivening the events which are presented in a few delicate, deft strokes. (...) Ghachar Ghochar is a sensitive analysis of how our middle-class existence is defined by a single shruti: anxiety. (...) The translation by Srinath Perur unerringly captures the shifting nuances that make Shanbhag’s telling so rich." - Girish Karnad, Indian Express
  
  
• "Literary perfection is elusive, yet it is possible, as Vivek Shanbhag demonstrates in his magnificent novella, where comedy is undercut by seething menace and overwhelming regret at a failure to act decently. (...) Ghachar Ghochar may well be one of the finest literary works you will ever encounter." - Eileen Battersby, Irish Times
  
  
• "This is a timely book, written with great depth and restraint, and skilfully translated from the Kannada by Srinath Perur (.....) Shanbhag portrays the existential crisis of Indian masculinity, seen from the inside. (...) By unnaming the narrator, Shanbhag evokes a loss of personal identity that creates an everyman." - Preti Taneja, New Statesman
  
  
• "This spiny, scary story of moral decline, crisply plotted and no thicker than my thumb, has been heralded as the finest Indian novel in a decade, notable for a book in bhasha, one of India’s vernacular languages. (...) Shanbhag is excellent on the inner logic of families, and of language, how even the most innocent phrases come freighted with history. (...) The book in our hands is elegant, lean, balletic" - Parul Sehgal, The New York Times Book Review

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

- Return to top of the page -

The complete review's Review:

       The narrator of Ghachar Ghochar begins his account from Coffee House, the restaurant that is his regular haunt -- and escape. He admits: "I come here for respite from domestic skirmishes": life revolves around family, and his is a tight-knit one of co-dependency, a family that has made good -- or at least moved up in the world -- but balances uneasily there.
       The narrator's uncle, his chikkappa [ಚಿಕ್ಕಪ್ಪ], Venkatachala (but called Chikkappa, which defines his exact (nominal) place in the family hierarchy) brought prosperity to the family with the spice trade firm he founded, Sona Masala. They are all in this together, with Chikkappa having given his older brother -- the narrator's father -- a half-stake in the company. Nominally, the narrator is director of the company, but eager beaver Chikkappa "has a weakness for work" -- and a knack for it -- and runs everything himself. They all live together, along with the narrator's mother, his sister, Malati, -- who was married but has returned to the more familiar familial fold -- and now his wife, Anita.
       The family had long lived very humbly, on the father's small income. Only when he was made redundant did Chikkappa start his company, its quick success transforming the family and its fortunes. The narrator describes the uneasy change brought about this way, and how the family adapted (and how, in some ways, it didn't).
       The entire family is dependent on Chikkappa, and completely deferential. They have their own quirks -- Malati, in particular, isn't very pleasant -- but make sure that Chikkappa's life in the household proceeds smoothly. The workaholic doesn't lord it over them; like everyone else, he simply takes the arrangements for granted -- while as far as work goes, he does what needs be done (some of which turns out to be rather unsavory).
       The ghachar ghochar of the title is, in fact, invention, an expression from the narrator's wife's family -- "There are only four people in this world know what it means", Anita tells him, before he becomes the fifth. They use it for when something has gotten so entangled that it's practically impossible to unravel -- a tangled kite string the original example. As the narrator comes to realize, his, and his family's life, have become ghachar ghochar.
       His wife, Anita, is the odd woman out, the foreign presence in the finely-tuned (if quite on edge) family machine. She's shocked to learn that her husband doesn't have a real job, a "respectable job" -- as, except for the occasional paper Chikkappa gives him to sign, he has no duties or obligations whatsoever; he comes 'to work' but does essentially nothing in his office beyond reading the newspapers. His business cards -- reprinted every year -- "say I'm the director of the firm", but he's barely even a figurehead.
       At one point in his account he asks:

     Now, what can I say of myself that is only about me and not tied up with the others ?

- M.A.Orthofer, 19 January 2017

- Return to top of the page -

Links:

• HarperCollins India publicity page
• Penguin Books publicity page
• Faber & Faber publicity page
• Akshara Prakashana publicity page
• Excerpt
• Q & A in the Indian Express
• Why ‘Ghachar Ghochar’ is the one novel that (presciently) sums up the state of the world today by Satyavrat KK

• Asian Review of Books
• Book Library Reviews
• CounterPunch
• Daliy Mail
• 1streading's Blog
• Fleeting Brook
• The Globe and Mail
• The Guardian
• Helter Skelter
• The Hindu
• Hindustan Times
• The Independent
• Indian Express
• Irish Times
• Kirkus Reviews
• LiveMint
• The Madras Mag
• Meraki Post
• Messenger's Booker (and more)
• The New Yorker
• News India Times
• New Statesman
• npr
• Open
• Publishers Weekly
• Quarterly Conversation
• Run Spot Run
• The Tales Pensieve
• Three Percent

• Official site

• See Index of Indian literature

- Return to top of the page -

About the Author:

       Vivek Shanbhag (ವಿವೇಕ ಶಾನಭಾಗ) is a Kannada-writing Indian author.

- Return to top of the page -

© 2017-2021 the complete review

Main | the New | the Best | the Rest | Review Index | Links