★ 10/16/2017
Freedom, as defined by the characters in Mukherjee’s brutally honest and haunting latest novel (after The Lives of Others), is a relative state. Most of them are striving to transcend lives of grinding poverty and degradation in contemporary India, where, though the “untouchable” designation has been abolished, the vicious caste system still victimizes village dwellers and domestic workers. Lakshman has abandoned his family and his dismally poor village to travel with a dancing bear (the bear “dances” when a rope is jerked painfully through his nose), only to realize that he has lost everything and that the bear is his only friend. Renu is a domestic cook in Bombay, working herself to the bone and juggling many jobs in order to pay for her nephew’s education. Milly is forced to rely on a man she does not know in order to escape slavelike servitude to her employers: “She had been untethered, set free, when all she wanted was the safety and security of not being alone.” Soni, who seeks freedom through activism with the Communist Party, discovers she is a prisoner of doctrinal subjugation. An unnamed father comes home to India from America to show his young son his heritage only to tragically realize that he can’t escape the ancient violence that lies simmering under the surface. Seen against a pitiless landscape of primitive villages and hellish urban slums, and the extremes of scorching heat and billowing monsoon rain, this is a compassionate, deeply felt tribute to India’s forgotten people who strive to triumph over subjugation. With its mixture of prose styles and narrative voices, Mukherjee’s novel is a literary achievement. (Jan.)
"An extraordinary achievement. Subtle and multilayered, it’s a study of the brutality of social divisions, written with tremendous tenderness; a work that insists on the dignity of figures obliged to lead undignified lives. A powerful, troubling novel. The moment I finished it, I began it again."
"A State of Freedom is formally audacious, vividly observed, and deeply imagined. Unsentimental yet full of heart, grimly real yet mysteriously dreamlike, with characters who continue to live their complicated lives long after you’ve turned the last page. Just a beautiful, beautiful piece of work."
"Exquisitely written, cleverly structured, powerfully resonant to the very last line…A profoundly intelligent and empathetic novel of privilege and poverty, advancement and entrapment."
"Neel Mukherjee's breathtaking A State of Freedom is that rarest, most wonderful of things: a book both literarily dextrous, full of unforgettable scenes, images, language, and characters, as well as a furious, unsparing, clear-eyed study of how a society's gross inequities of money and power demean and deform the human condition. The most astonishing and brilliant novel I have read in a long, long time."
"Simply gorgeous…A State of Freedom is a marvel of a book, shocking and beautiful, and it proves that Mukherjee is one of the most original and talented authors working today."
"Many of the sections are sprinkled with otherworldly moments and spectral figures, so that these narratives read almost like ghost stories, while others are rooted firmly in the achingly realistic, unequal, and unjust soil of modern day India."
"Without announcing his experimental intent too loudly, Mukherjee rips the meat of the novel (imagery, incident, social insight, feeling, mood) from the bones (narrative and character development in the usual sense) and feeds his readers only the richest pieces…Mukherjee looks straight at the ugliest parts of an unequal society and uses what he finds to construct something beautiful."
"This is a great hymn to poor, scabby humanity, a devastating portrait of poverty and the inhumanity of the rich to the poor. A masterpiece."
★ 11/01/2017
The five "narrative parts" of this work, designated only with Roman numerals, comprise five styles: short story; first-person, faux memoir; folktale of sorts; ten-parts-plus-epilog novella; and no-punctuation vignette. The connections require attention, with results well worth the reader's intriguing participation. An Indian American professor's tragedy-ensuing visit with his six-year-old son to iconic Indian landmarks amid hordes of destitute locals confirms "the plush West had made him skinless like a good, sheltered first-world liberal." A London-based writer visits his parents in Mumbai and develops a relationship with the family's cook that challenges employer/employee boundaries. A bear cub is brutally trained to perform by his desperate owner. Two childhood village friends experience diverging adulthoods. A disjointed voice confronts impending death. Man Booker Prize short-listed Mukherjee (for The Lives of Others) gathers a cast of untethered characters to present urgent, even beseeching, testimony on how the titular "state of freedom" is too often more impossible dream than achievable reality. A Q&A with Hanya Yanagihara reveals Mukherjee's intent that Freedom be "an homage, a conversation" with V.S. Naipaul's In a Free State; familiarity with that work is unnecessary to be awed. VERDICT Libraries with internationally savvy audiences should prepare for substantial demand. [See Prepub Alert, 7/31/17.]—Terry Hong, Smithsonian BookDragon, Washington, DC
★ 2017-10-11
Five diverse lives in India are traced and linked, exposing the aching gulfs in experience and opportunity that exist in a complex nation.Particle physicists, Maoist terrorists, punitive employers, servants, and émigrés all have roles in Mukherjee's (The Lives of Others, 2014, etc.) third novel, which is composed of interwoven short fictions moving between seething cities and rural life at its most impoverished. Themes of money, work, politics, survival, and women's roles connect the characters. In Bombay, an elderly couple with a new cook welcomes home their liberal son, now living overseas, on his annual visit. His keen interest in food and research for a cookbook lead to awkward efforts to befriend the cook, resulting in a visit to her family's home, a trip seamed with shame, pity, and wonder. Elsewhere, a poor villager, crushed under the burden of trying to provide not only for his own family, but his brother's, too—the brother has gone to find work on construction sites in the cities—is relieved, perhaps, by the discovery of a bear cub. Having trained the bear to "dance"—an unbearably cruel process—man and animal begin a life together on the road and a kind of parallel existence, begging for food and money, debased and suffering. The fate of the absent brother is glimpsed in the sinister, haunting opening of the book and confirmed in its final section. The London-based Mukherjee surprises once again with the form of his storytelling while confirming anew the depth of his empathy. His characters' life journeys are often painful while his descriptions of their circumstances are unsentimental, vivid, unsparing. Above all there is compassion here, alongside a focus that depicts gross inequities with a grim tenderness.A calm, compelling, unshrinking portrait of humanity in transition; both disturbing and dazzling.
Modern India is a place full of people teeming with ambitions, and narrator Sartaj Garewal brings them to life in Mukherjee's linked short stories. Garewal’s narration depicts a range of people and places: fathers and sons, drivers and riders. Garewal maintains his enthusiasm across the wide range of characters who struggle to achieve their private dreams. At times, his delivery choices can overwhelm the listener; for example, when he's portraying young children or pushy beggars, their high-pitched tones come across as overdone. But a feeling of being overwhelmed can be part of visiting one of the world's most populous nations, so perhaps this is a fitting approach to Mukherjee’s slice-of-life exploration of India. M.R. © AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine
