A Suitable Boy
The tale of Lata's and her mother's attempts to find a suitable boy, through love or through maternal appraisal. Set in post-independence India and involving the lives of four families, it is also an explanation of a whole continent faced with its first great General Election.
Stats for nerds
3recommend
11mentions
9people
2010–2026years
27% recommend73% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth. One of the longest English novels, but it has got me hooked. I love how descriptive the prose is. I can almost see the events happen in front of my eyes. There's a bbc adaptation as well, but I was enraged by it so I can't recommend it.
- I read Anna Karenina and also War and Peace at a time in my youth between work and school where I had the time to just relax with friends and just read a lot of novels. Only in retrospect do you realize how precious those times are.
War and Peace was hard to start because of all the characters, but I got lost in it and it was really worth it. You don't have to pay a lot of attention to the chapters on the meaning of history unless it interests you. Anna Karenina I felt like I dived right into because it was a "smaller" story focused on really well defined characters. But I don't feel like it gripped me all the way through as much as War and Peace.
With books like that-- if you have the time to really sink into them-- you feel like you know the characters as people in the way you know your friends. They are like people you have known. The closest modern book to that I think is A Suitable Boy.
But if it isn't for you in terms of your time or your interest you shouldn't feel bad about it.
- Anna Karenina, A Suitable Boy, and the like. Excellent books but after college it's been difficult to start and keep at them in a acceptable period of time given the time (or lack of it) is an issue now. I also wanted to read Ulysses. I am stuck around the ~20% of Dostoyevsky's Idiot since a long time. Off late I've had better success with shortner ones.
For me the reason is simple - it's just the daunting number of pages and it is a shame that I have not read/finished these books.
- Interestingly when I hear the author describe different kinds of "difficulty" I find myself thinking that some of those don't really seem like difficulty. For something like a book, I think the main thing that makes it seem difficult is when there are parts that are not fun to read (or maybe moments where you question the point of the entire read because you pause to go "what the heck is even going on here"). If something's fun it often doesn't really feel difficult.
In particular various kinds of formal experimentation can be quite fun and I wouldn't perceive them as difficult at all (especially in shorter form). I read a short story in multiple-choice form years ago and loved it. I've read most of Milorad Pavic's books, all of which have unusual formal structures (e.g., Dictionary of the Khazars has the nonlinear structure of a cross-referenced dictionary or encyclopedia). Some were a bit baffling (they also can fall into the "confusing events, surrealist dream logic, and elliptical plots" category) but I didn't find them difficult exactly.
One of the more common practical difficulties that can add friction to a book is a complex storyline with many characters who can be hard to keep track of. But this won't make the book as a whole feel super difficult as long as the content is worth it. War and Peace is a classic example of this, with multiple intersecting storylines and a large cast of characters. A Suitable Boy is a modern example in a similar vein.
But I think a lot of times when people say a book is difficult they just mean either "gosh I actually kind of have to pay attention to this" or "this is really long". To me those things actually are positive qualities if the content of the book is good, since they just make it richer. My favorite novel is In Search of Lost Time, which is one of the quintessential "difficult" books, but if you get into its rhythm, most of it is blissfully engrossing.
- Purely in the domain of writers and endings, Patrick O'Brien has one of his characters say they think unfinished novels don't need a conclusion any more than an unfinished work of music does: you can imagine how the story goes on for yourself.
Vikram Seth does the same thing with the ending of "a suitable boy" as does Anne Proulx in "the shipping news"
Writing of one's own mortality in these situations obviously invites the final word, but it actually doesn't have to be cast as such.
For this author the situation is terrible, but the writing doesn't have to echo that finality, there's a choice to be made.
- Vikram Seth. Massive advance for a "jump novel" on "a suitable boy" characters in modern times, breaks up with life partner, has total catastrophic writers block, book still "coming soon" a decade later.
Also a poet. Said to pick his team at the agency from people who like poetry, working his prose.
