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It’s always a tricky question: how long should you carry on reading a book when you’re really not enjoying it? I generally give it 100-200 pages to provide me with some reason to keep reading. I rarely give up on books and doing so always makes me feel guilty, like I haven’t them a fair chance. Now I’m giving up on ‘A Fine Balance�, a superbly written novel, after getting only 142 pages in over more than a month. I’ll tell you why: it was upsetting me too much. Not that I am a terribly delicate flower with fiction - I made it through Germinal. ‘A Fine Balance� read to me as a catalogue of beautifully expressed human suffering. What really got to me about this suffering, I think, was the combination of mundanity, which lent absolute conviction, and pervasiveness.

Regarding the former, I’ve always been more easily moved by the small, everyday tragedies than the epic, capital-R romantic stuff. For example, I am rarely inspired to tears by heroic sacrifice in films, whereas I once absolutely cried my eyes out at a medical documentary about an elderly man dying peacefully in his sleep. Sweeping tragedy can take on a magnificence (just ask Victor Hugo) and even when that is lacking invites abstraction into symbols. Small everyday sadnesses have none of that, which makes me feel them all the more intensely. In ‘A Fine Balance� there is no great meaning to the characters� sufferings, they just happen. The devastation of this is compounded by the latter element, pervasiveness. Mistry introduces a character and gives you their background: the losses, disappointments, and sadness they have suffered. You sympathise with them. Then he shifts perspective to a someone who was unsympathetic in the previous character’s story - an oppressive rent-collector or mean boss - and does the same for them. This conveys to the reader that everyone’s life is full of suffering and that, even as they try to do their best, everyone cannot help but make others unhappy. Mistry shows this with great skill.

Thus I found myself putting off reading ‘A Fine Balance�. When I would normally pick up my current novel, I started another book, or read the internet, or binge-watched netflix, or stared out of the train window daydreaming, or even sorted through months of receipts. Once I realised I was doing so, I asked myself: who are you reading this book for? I read because I love reading, for joy, for escape, and for learning. No-one is forcing me to read. So I’m putting aside ‘A Fine Balance� because it was making me sad and therefore I didn’t want to read it. Perhaps I’ll pick it up again sometime, as it is undoubtedly well-written, evocative, and powerful. I was expecting it to deal directly with the political upheavals of 1970s India, which I expect it does further on, rather than the grinding daily tragedy of individual lives. Of course, that’s how you convey the reality of politics. If I wanted that sort of sadness in my life, though, I’d read (more of) the news.