A State of Freedom by Neel Mukherjee

A quietly methodical, meticulously observed and strikingly rendered indictment of the class system in India, this was by no means an easy read. Thing is, I’m not even quite sure how I ended up with it, because all I remember reading about it was something something India, something something immigration, which isn’t even all the way accurate.
But who am I to turn down a book once acquired, especially one so generously lauded and praised by a variety of respectable sources, especially one that looks that promised to be a suitable entry for my international reading…so to India then. A place I’d never ever want to visit any way outside of armchair traveling and even at such a remove…it’s (charitably) unpalatable. An impression this book has all but set in stone.
It’s billed as a novel, but reads as a collection of tangentially interconnected at best short stories. Long shot stories at that. Five of them. The first two have to do with people who has left India for the West and come back to visit, highlighting culture clashes and social differences, so it seems like that would be a theme, but then it pivots to the slums, which in India are never far (in fact, tragically nearby) from the posh manicured abodes of the well to do. And that’s where the going gets really tough. The third story absolutely whams you. If you’re an animal lover, it’s almost too brutal of a read, this tale of a beaten down by life man who tries to give himself another chance at success by raising and training a bear cub. Mind you, this isn’t a world where people are all that nice to each other, in fact the protagonist of that story is very abusive to his wife, so just imagine how someone like that would be towards an animal.
The fourth chapter/story revisits a maid from the second one and is by far the most complete and engaging of the collection as it follows her from the impoverish girlhood in a destitute village to an ambitious entrepreneurial young woman juggling jobs in the city, determined to give her children the chances/education she never got.
It all ends in a stream of consciousness punctuation free short that mainly makes you glad the entire novel didn’t that style. The rest to the novel is actually quite exquisite style wise. The narrative is stunning, no matter what ugliness it takes on, it offers the kind of vividness and dimensionality you’re likely to find in the finest works of literature. It’s a powerhouse, really, and so emotionally affecting and affective, it can be positively emotionally exhausting.
Or maybe it’s just India. It’s easy enough complaining about the economic disparity in the first world to forget about what it’s like in the developing nations. The kind of poverty that millions upon millions of people live there is almost beyond imagining, it seems like an anachronism, something that was left behind ages ago. The levels of privation when it comes to the most basic things, food, education, plumbing, electricity, literacy…it’s staggering. And this poverty is nearly impossible to leave behind, for those who try there’s the constant economic drain of enormous needy families and then, between supporting the parents and siblings left behind and trying to provide for kids inevitably produced despite the circumstances, elevating one’s position in the world takes the kind of determination, will and opportunities seldom available, summoned or provided. Which is why the maid’s tale is the most interesting one, at least from the social anthropologist’s perspective.
So on purely didactic level this certainly works. And the writing’s terrific, so you get the literary satisfaction. Narratively, it leaves something to be desired, because the author doesn’t seem to enjoy wrapping things up neatly, the stories have ambiguous (or just WTF as the first story) endings that seemingly invite the readers to imagine their outcomes. There’s much left unexplained (the maids’ rivalry), things unraveled and not raveled back up, etc. It isn’t all nicely laid out and presented to the audience, but then again a book like that probably wouldn’t, nothing about it is easy reading. But if you can brave the bleakness and heaviness of it all, it’s certainly deserves a consideration. If only as a reminder of the bleak and heavy world at large. If only as an exercise in compassion. A difficult book to recommend, but it does what great books ought to, instructs us in the ways of the world, and thus it’s well worth a read.