BOOK REVIEW

Pankaj Mishra's only novel “The Romantics” is heavily influenced by Flaubert. Published in 2001, it is a story of people trying to find solace in cultures other than their own; of people mired in romanticism they fail to shed. We have the East trying to be the West to find happiness. We have the West trying to be the East to be happy.
Young Samar, the protagonist, arrives in Banaras to get some reading done and study for the civil exams. He rents a room on a roof and spends his time reading Turgenev, Flaubert and Edmund Wilson.

So when he falls in love with Catherine, a French girl he meets at a party, he is perplexed. He has never had a girlfriend, has never flirted -- he has always been shy. They end up having an affair anyway. The rest I don't want to spoil.

Mishra's words are beautifully constructed. You read him and you can experience the view Samar sees as he takes his usual walk from home to the university library. You can almost smell the dust of the village, as Samar visits one in the course of the novel.

It is sensual and sensitive. Samar is the college kid who is alienated and wants to hide beneath pages and pages of literature. Everywhere around him is the surge of spiritual tourists occupying the town of Banaras in search of bliss in a culture that confuses him.

Mishra is a brilliant non-fiction writer, and has been credited in discovering some awesome talent like Raj Kamal Jha and Arundhati Roy, yet his fiction output is sadly limited to this novel.

Like Samar, we are often in need of a clear cut story that is deeply moving with no embellishment, no Rushdian Hyperbole, and no Upamanya Chatterje-esque mordant wit.

We need rain and we need the protagonist to drench in it and we want him to be happy.