Amitav Ghosh, the author of The Circle of Reason and The Shadow Lines, weaves a complex fabric with some of the fundamentals of the deepest corners of our mind: the animistic instinct, the urge to discover, and the magnetism of finding one's roots. All this woven against a primitive landscape of water and silt, time set against tidal surges and mangrove forest, a flat land low against a stormy sky in the Bengal delta, a place that Ghosh brings alive with the apparent deftness of long familiarity. The plot is brilliant--a young woman smitten with the bug of a naturalist's passion is looking for the elusive fresh water porpoise in the riverine Sunderbans, an uneducated fisherman youth, his youthful wife and the locals with convoluted past in the backdrop of 1970s Bengal, create a drama that is wholly compelling yet mysteriously magical. Ghosh draws with broad swaths of a charcoal, as it were, constructing a dark world of primitive elements that probe deeply into our human self with the ease and flourish of a master craftsman. Magic is in the air and water, in the sky and in dolphin's breath. The story attains a crescendo in the form of a huge storm that changes not merely the landscape. A book written with deft craftsmanship and intimate knowledge. Read it.

'The Hungry Tide' is a patchy book. Being my first Amitav Ghosh novel, I am not sure if this is generally true with all his work. Here you find yourself going through chapter after chapter monotonously without it making the slightest impression on your mind. Then, all of a sudden, you come across a passage which will get you interested. But it doesn't last long.

The issue here is with the plot which seems as implausible as the worst Bollywood movie. An American scientist of Indian origin falling for an illiterate Bengali fisherman is something that you would expect to encounter in a 70s Hindi flick, not in a 21st century novel by one of the foremost Indian writers in English.

On the positive side, Ghosh does succeed in conjuring up vivid images of the tide country. Sadly, he fails to populate them with interesting characters.

Couldn't make it past page 20, the dialogue was just too forced. Instead, PLEASE read the Glass Palace.

Es curioso lo que me ha pasado con este libro, me ha resultado un poco aburrido, pero me lo he leído igual. Tal vez porque la ambientación me pareció interesante y habla de una zona de la India de la que no sabía mucho. Por ejemplo, al final la trama tiene relación con la Guerra de Liberación de Bangladesh de 1971.

Pero de nuevo, no es que tenga nada. Es un melodrama pausado, con cierto componente de novela histórica, que se deja leer pero no sorprende nunca.

An amazingly weaved story set in bengal and sundarbans, exploring history, myth, fauna, and complex relationships.
Amitav Ghosh actually manages to bring the whole atmospheric setting alive through his story telling, which is one of the best I have ever experienced.
Each character whether it was Piya, Kanai, Fokir, Nirmal, Horen, Kusum is so intricately developed. My favourites were Piya and Fokir.
This is my 3rd book by Amitav Ghosh and surely he is turning into one of my favourite authors.

The Hungry Tide - Amitav Ghosh
Rating 3/5

Edit - I was disappointed with my own review as I felt it to be a cribfest, hence chose to re-write the same.

This book has been a long, hard and disappointing read. All the while, I felt it to be a (pointless) meandering effort which only felt complete when I liberally skipped a good 60 pages towards the end.

The book had a very interesting beginning. An unread 20 year old book, Sunderbans, the tide country causing much anticipation in the reader who is looking forward for a thriller. Alas, the nucleus of the book is the 'Morichjhappi massacre' of 1979. Ghosh tries to portray (in a way, I believe) how the massacre has influenced and changed the lives of many individuals and few fictious ones introduced via this book.

The main character Nirmal, a liberal, secular leftist happens to witness the Morichjhapi events and documents the prelude in this diary, which goes un-noticed for a good 20 years before it resurfaces, only to land in the hands of the narrator Kanai.

Alongside Ghosh, describes Lusibari and its history where Nirmal and Nilima have made their home for many years. Hamilton and his idea of a parallel society, ecosystem have been mentioned. The narrator Kanai is coupled with a scientist Piyali who is interested in tracking Gangetic dolphins and Irrawadi Dolphins. So, there is mention of dolphins and how they were found in the Sunderbans history and the ecological degradation which has since then occured.

Interwined to these are the stories of the boatman Fokir who leads the dolphin chase and his wife Moyna who works as a nurse. Ghosh tackles the sensitive scenario of a strong and bold feminist woman being married to a illiterate boatman.

Though the contents of the diary give an idea of the 1979 massacre, it is so sparsely spread across multitude of stories that, it makes it hard to lay emphasis on any one of the incidents. Overall the reader gets way too many stuffs to read about, history, ecology, dolphins, folklore - Bon-Bibi, human animal conflict, high tide, hurricanes, Lusibari, Canning, Malta.

I felt the book to be pretty normal (disappointing compared to The Shadow Lines) considering there were so many things in here, according to me, it lacked a punch where in I would call it wow! The writing was pretty pretty normal, it didn't cause any upsurge in my curiosity to read the book any quicker.

The only complaint what I have in my mind is, Ghosh makes it look so easy, the human life in a tide country, fishing, growing rice, leading a life. These are hard things in Sunderbans, Ghosh tries to tackle an improvised scenario of the massacre, but the basic life to be lead which is so so difficult in Sunderbans is overlooked altogether or may be his words make it look simple (all the while it for sure ain't).

Cheers,

This one was profound and fed my hunger for stories & literature.

The narrative is so mesmerizing that for each and every scene you have a picture vividly imagined in your mind. You will be able to see the mangrove forested shore, Lusibari and it’s hospital building. You can see the Guest House and it’s compound. You can see the Jowar & the Bhata.

The way this story starts, the characters meet and depart each their way, the stories of the characters progress in their own will only to collide and separate again gives the feeling of a poetry on its own flow.

A simple and humble backdrop of a tide country, simple characters with the elements of Jowar & Bhata and the author spun such a great story as to never forget.

I think I was not able to do justice to this book as I was distracted during its reading especially in the last parts. But there were things that clung to me - the beauty and wildness of the Sunderbans( One day I will definitely go there) the Dolphins and the Tigers. The dolphins and the tigers were also characters and so much was new to me regarding them. I loved the way the story unfolded with the schoolmaster's memoir along with Piya's adventure . And Fokir!!!! What a character. Will read more of Amitav Ghosh in the coming years.

I first read of the Sundarbans region in an intensely magical realist depiction in Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, so I was curious to read a real-world depiction of the same region. Piya, the idealistic American-born marine biologist, is well-balanced by Kanai, the more cynical translator, whose childhood connections to the area give him a very different perspective. The third major character, Fokir, remains an enigma due to his inability to communicate directly with Piya, except through translations and signs, since they have no languages in common. Piya's idealization of this illiterate fisherman, who reads the river so brilliantly, is examined and thrown into question, but never ridiculed. The conflict between displaced and impoverished people and endangered wildlife is vividly presented in the scene where villagers hunt a tiger who has been preying on them, and it's clear there are no easy answers.

Impressive narration !!!

Despite being one of the finest Indian writers alive, I'm a bit ashamed to admit that until recently I'd only read just one book by him - The Calcutta Chromosome. I did begin reading The Shadow Lines and immensely enjoyed it, although I can't recollect why I left the book unfinished. I made a fresh beginning with The Hungry Tide though, determined to read this one fully. I'm happy to report that I succeeded, with very little effort. He is an incredible writer and his writing so easily charms us into believing that the the world of Kanai, Lucibari and Piya actually exist. This was also the first instance where I alternated between the Hardback and the eBook (one for daytime, and the other at night) and I do believe that my loyalties don't lie with any one side of the p-book versus e-book debate. Both formats are useful in their own ways.

The hungry tide by Amitav Ghosh

This book came to me at the right time. Me being ignorant about Sundarbans, about the various floods which have ravaged the tide country. My first Amitav Ghosh, and I read this book in one sitting. I had no idea about the archipelago of Sundarbans with its mangrove forests and how this forests forms the epitome of so many refugees. Why so many people still tend to stay there? What goes through in their minds?
Unfettered by floods, tiger attacks, huge man-eating crocodiles, life prevails here. Piya, a cetalogist comes in search of the elusive Orcacella to Sunderbans to document it. Amitav Ghosh has put in so much research on the Dolphins, as well as the wildlife in Sunderbans that it made me almost wish I was there.

“But here, in the tide country, transformation is the rule of life: rivers stray from week to week, and islands are made and unmade in days. In other places forests take centuries, even millennia, to regenerate; but mangroves can recolonize a denuded island in ten to fifteen years. Could it be the very rhythms of the earth were quickened here so that they unfolded at an accelerated pace?”

She encounters Kanai, a translator from Delhi enroute to Luisbari (one of the islands of Sunderbans) urgentlly called upon by his aunt to read his dead uncle's notes. Fokir, a poor fisherman crosses Piya's path on her search for the dolphin.

What unfolds is pure beauty in prose! We see how without understanding language people fall in love.. even though tied by family.
We see how the flame of revolutionaries never burns out.. always a light smoke in the wick.. waiting for the fire..

“(He) was in love with the idea of revolution. Men like that, even when they turn their backs on their party and their comrades, can never let go of the idea: it's the secret god that rules their hearts. It is what makes them come alive; they revel in the danger, the exquisite pain. It is to them what childbirth is to a woman, or war to a mercenary.”

This novel is an experiment in human emotions.. what is love? What is protection and what is duty? Peppered with rich culture of the tide country we see the magic flowing through the pages? Folk tales come alive.. Non-believers be wary ..

I just went over the same question over and over in my mind again. Why would people stay here? So much threat to human life..
"The speciality of mangroves is that they do not merely recolonize land; they erase time. Every generation creates its own population of ghosts.''

Amitav Ghosh presents both worlds- but pleads with us to view the story from a grey lens- a nuanced perspective free of all judgement..
''That words are like the winds that blow ripples on the water's surface. The river itself flows beneath, unseen and unheard.''
This last quote left me speechless.