Rohinton Mistry, A master story teller, he grips the reader with easy paced narrative. He uses humour and brilliant characterisation to produce most vibrant characters.
Gustad Noble, a Parsi in his mid-forties. Years after the collapse of his father’s bookselling business and the subsequent loss of nearly all the family’s belongings and after years of sacrifice on his and his wife’s part (especially following his broken hip nine years before), Gustad finally has reason to hope: His elder son, Sohrab, has been accepted at the prestigious India Institute of Technology.
Sohrab, however, has other interests, other plans.As relations between father and son deteriorate, the plot of SUCH A LONG JOURNEY begins to take on the melodramatic shading of a Hindi movie. His son’s ingratitude, his daughter’s worsening illness, friction with his neighbors, and soaring prices are set against the backdrop of the second India-Pakistan war and the transformation of east Pakistan into independent Bangladesh.
Mistry’s able to convey that indeed the longest journeys are the one taken by the mind and one realizes this every time years fall away as Gustad smells the spine of a classic or looks at an old Meccano set in Chor Bazaar.
