Ghachar Ghochar - Vivek Shanbhag - ★★★★.¼

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AUTHOR: Vivek Shanbhag
TRANSLATOR: Srinath Perur
GENRE: Indian Fiction.
PUBLICATION DATE: January 1, 2013
RATING: 4.25 stars.


Those who have regularly interacted with me on my Facebook group, Readers Forever!, know that I do not have a preference for contemporary Indian authors. Forget preference, I don't even consider their books worth reading. Before you get all riled up by this admission, please note that I don't include expats such as Jhumpa Lahiri or Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, senior storytellers such as Sudha Murty or Ruskin Bond and classic masters such as Rabindranath Tagore or Satyajit Ray in this category. What I mean is the likes of Chetan Bhagat (I blame him and him alone for the plethora of B-grade books in the market!), Durjoy Datta, Ravinder Singh, Savi Sharma and others of this ilk.

An unfortunate side-effect of this closeminded bias was that I missed out on some genuinely good books just because of their authors being modern Indians. To remedy this lacuna, I shortlisted some positively-reviewed Indian books and decided to try them out. The very first book in this category has been "Ghachar Ghochar" and boy! What a ride it has been!

Vivek Shanbag is a famed storyteller in Kannada. Ghachar Ghochar was originally published in Kannada itself, and now it has been masterfully translated by Srinath Perur. I do consider the translator's job as very essential because he needs to retain the original meaning and nuance without killing anything in the translation. And Srinath Perur has done a superb job indeed! Perfect language and grammar without interfering with the flow of the original narrative!

Ghachar Ghochar contains the reminiscences of a man about his family before and after they came into money. Each chapter deals with a specific family member and yet, throws light on the family as a whole.
The book is not a typical progressive story but is very meandering in style. Events occur but don't lead to one another directly. It's upto us to figure out the connection between the various occurrences. Also, consider yourself warned: it has an open ending, which really caught me by surprise. I thought my book had some pages missing! This book was so reminiscent of a Murakami work where the flow goes at its own pace and the interpretation & conclusion is entirely dependent on the reader...

I would not recommend this book to everyone. But if you like a book that makes you think about the purpose behind a particular event's mention in the story, a book that causes you to be alert while reading it so as to not miss out on any nuance, a book that stays with you after its last page making you wonder what the author actually intended, and a book that reveals all its tangled threads to be essential to the master narrative long after you've closed it, Ghachar Ghochar is the book for you. Even the book cover is absolutely perfect, which you'll realise only after reading it.

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