The Romantics

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A Private Affair

Pankaj Mishra's remarkable debut, The Romantics, is that rare novel in which the nature of the story perfectly matches the means of its telling. In precise, brooding language, the narrator, Samar, relates his own tragic romance and demonstrates his struggle for self-understanding. At times, his tone and descriptive power seem akin to an outsider's celebration of the "exotic," yet, ironically, he is a native Indian—a Brahmin intellectual trapped in a homeland where he does not feel at home. His very language betrays the contradiction he lives. Here, for instance, is the scene at the Shivrati festival in Benares, India's holiest city:

All around me, and in the distance, swarmed a crowd of pilgrims, with not a patch of uncovered ground to be seen anywhere...ash-smeared mattlocked Naga sadhus with gleaming tridents, their long penises slackly swinging as they walked...past the coconut and flower sellers, the anxious-eyed cows, and the fat priests under their tattered straw umbrellas, to the river, throwing rose petals over their heads, up toward where the monkeys balanced on electric poles, quiet and watchful.

Samar's mother has recently passed away, and his father, following "an old rite of passage: the withdrawal from the active world in late middle age, the retreat into self," has retired to a distant ashram. Finished with college, Samar lives on a small allowance and studies "big books" by Western writers such as Schopenhauer, Turgenev, and Flaubert. "I wanted to read," he says, "and do as little as possible beside that." Still, while he enjoys "an exalted bond" with each writer, he eventually finds that "the substitution of books for friendship...seemed to work less and less."

Samar, by no means socially adept, becomes friends with his middle-aged English neighbor, Miss West. Once a great beauty, and still well preserved, Miss West introduces him to her friends, Western "seekers" who enjoy discussing their private affairs as much as enacting them. "Faced with such mature experience of the world," he admits, "I felt the fragility of my own personality, my lack of opinions and taste." The very notion of private affairs seems to fascinate Samar, as does his suspicion that Miss West harbors a mysterious sadness in her past.

His own private affair arrives in the form of Catherine, a young French friend of Miss West's. Catherine lives with her Indian lover, Anand, and has plans to help him pursue a musical career in Paris; despite this attachment, she and Samar become friends. He frequents Catherine's house, fearing that his eagerness to visit "has something coarse in it, and unhealthy." He cannot help himself.

When Miss West abandons a vacation at the last minute, Samar and Catherine (Anand has conveniently been left behind) are left to travel to the Himalayas with no chaperone. Soon, amid Catherine's endearments, Samar clumsily loses his innocence, and he claims "a growing conviction that I had all along been marked in some mysterious way, that after the dull, pointless years of drift...I had been predestined for the moment when I met Catherine—the encounter in which some of the richness of life and the world were revealed to me."

Yet when the two return to Benares, Catherine swears Samar to silence and continues to plan her future with Anand. Samar becomes a patient prisoner to Catherine's moods and begins to suspect that "the person with very ordinary concerns was more authentic and tangible than the person who had bestowed her gift of tenderness and happiness on me." Their intimacy, despite his continued hopes, is never renewed.

It is sometimes difficult, as a reader, to know how seriously to take this romance. We do not have Catherine's thoughts, but only her endearments, which (even Samar acknowledges) come to her very easily, as if practiced. We see only the effect of the romance on Samar; his feelings—even if misguided, or not truly reciprocated—are real. This inequality raises the question that resonates throughout The Romantics: If one is a "romantic," how can the world within be brought into alignment with the world of others?

After his tryst with Catherine, Samar's interest in all else dwindles. His disengagement shows especially in the novel's uneven subplot, which attempts to document his friendship with Rajesh, an Indian student with obscure political connections. In fact, the narrative and its language falter whenever Samar attempts to describe India or Indians without the company of his Western friends. At these moments, Samar loses the romantic sensibility that he enjoys when witnessing his country through their eyes. He can never be a Westerner (for instance, he is mistaken for Catherine's tour guide), yet he cannot seem to become interested in India.

Living between these worlds, and unable to realize his dreams, Samar's "romanticism" verges on delusion. If, as he claims, the world's richness has been revealed to him through Catherine's love, how can he translate this revelation to his readers? The answer is this novel, where contradictions flourish and the descriptive power of the prose is intoxicating, controlled, and sure. Here, on display, is the state of Samar's mind, the honest and perplexing atmosphere of his sensibility. (When he tries to explain his thoughts, however, he tends to turn clumsy and intrusive.)

"The world is maya, illusion," he says, remembering "one of the very first things my father told me. But it is a meaningless idea to a child, and the peculiar ordeals of adulthood take you even further away from true comprehension." Samar responds to his ordeals by following his father, and renouncing the active life—he leaves Benares to become a schoolteacher in a Himalayan village. Whether or not he has cast off his romanticism, or his attachment to Catherine, time passes nevertheless and cannot be turned back. He concludes his story by claiming to have achieved calmness, but this is difficult, if not impossible, to believe. His emotion shows on every page of his retelling, and the ideas he's raised will not allow readers to forget, either; like the prose itself, the questions remain provocative, alive, and tingling long after the book is closed.

—Peter Rock

Peter Rock is the author of the novels Carnival Wolves and This Is the Place. Born in Salt Lake City, Utah, he now lives in Philadelphia. His email address is [email protected].

About the Author

Pankaj Mishra was born in 1969. He is a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books, The New Statesman, and The Times Literary Supplement, as well as several Indian publications. He is currently editing an anthology of Indian writing. He divides his time between New Delhi and Simla.

Marie Arana

Most thrillingly, this supple first novel offers continual evidence of the quick intelligence behind it. Mishra's humanity and emotional clarity are rare in so young a writer.
—The Washington Post

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Mishra's passionate, ambitious but not entirely successful debut follows the sentimental education of its ingenuous, sensitive Indian narrator. Twenty years old and indigent, Samar has already spent three years at the University of Allahabad when he arrives in Benares in the harsh winter of 1989, hoping to learn the ways of the Western world. In a cold room he rents from an opium-dazed musician, Samar devotes his time to reading Schopenhauer and Turgenev--the sort of big books "that make idleness attractive," each filled with the promise of "wisdom and knowledge." When a middle-aged Englishwoman, Diana West, decides to create a social life for him, Samar is thrust into a circle of American and European expatriates. Through Miss West, the young Brahmin meets and falls in love with the ravishing Catherine, in flight from her "oppressively bourgeois" French parents and involved with a hopeless sitar player named Anand. The impassioned opinions of Miss West and the foreigners alert Samar to his own (perceived) inadequacies. But Samar gradually realizes that the Westerners seek an India that does not really exist, an "Edenic setting of self-sufficient villages," "consciously ethnic knickknacks" and Ayurvedic medicine. In stark contrast to the yearning, decadent drifters is the secretive Rajesh, a campus agitator whose Brahmin admirers overlook his intellectual flaws. Samar's later travels with Catherine awaken romantic feelings previously suppressed by his own traditions, and he feels keenly the struggle between his ancestral obligations (he visits his sick father in Pondicherry) and his new emotional life. As his hopes for a relationship with Catherine diminish, he gets a chance to teach English to children in Dharamsala, where he attempts to embrace his solitude. In a denouement that strains credulity, chance encounters with the foreigners from Benares persistently destroy Samar's peace of mind. Mishra seems not to trust his reader to recognize significant events; his frequent reminders slow the book's pace considerably. Nevertheless, his descriptions of the Indian landscape are sensuous; one can smell the cumin and coriander seeds, feel the hum of large crowds in the streets. Samar's bildungsroman is a promising first novel from a writer to watch. (Feb.) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.

KLIATT

Set in the holy city of Benares, located on the west bank of the Ganges River, The Romantics paints a vivid picture of exotic India. Beggars clog the streets; pilgrims bathe on the steps of the famous ghats, or landing steps, where the dead are burned; and the Mafia exerts a stronger hold each day. Samar, a 19-year-old Brahmin student, has just completed studies at Allahabad University and must now study for his civil service exams, which his father hopes will secure him a reliable job in the government. Instead of applying himself, however, Samar reads Western literature in the library and mingles with visiting Europeans and Americans, friends of his neighbor, the Englishwoman Miss West, who have traveled to India to experience its unique culture. A stranger to love, Samar first witnesses expressions of romantic love among these foreigners, especially between Catherine, a young woman from Paris, and her lover, Anand, an Indian sitar player. Samar himself falls in love with her, although after a brief affair in Kalpi, she returns to Anand. Unable to reconcile the love traditions of Indian society with the romantic love he has now seen, Samar is faced with a decision on how to proceed with his life. A simply written but heavily analytical novel, full of beautiful passages describing the intriguing land of India and its customs, The Romantics will appeal to adults and teens who possess the curiosity to experience foreign cultures by entering the minds of their native writers. KLIATT Codes: SA—Recommended for senior high school students, advanced students, and adults. 2000, Random House, Anchor, 277p. 21cm. 99-15799., $13.00. Ages 16 to adult. Reviewer: Susan G. Allison;Libn., Lewiston H.S., Lewiston, ME , July 2001 (Vol. 35, No. 4)

Library Journal

Samar is a young student who has relocated to Benares, a holy pilgrimage site for Hindus. Samar's move there is an intellectual and emotional pilgrimage that will allow him to explore who he is and who he can become. Two relationships shade his explorations of self: one with the enigmatic Rajesh, a student activist with gangster overtones, and the other with Catherine, a beautiful French student who will introduce him to both romantic love and regret. Samar's evolution is ponderous, and he spends much time in introspection. He drifts between so many worlds, particularly those of East and West and head and heart. Mishra's writing style is fluid, and he effectively captures the physical and emotional environment in which his characters live. Recommended where there is interest in new literature that is written from a different perspective.--Caroline M. Hallsworth, Sudbury P.L., ON Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.

Akash Kapur

The Romantics establishes Mishra as the author of spare and reflective fiction that is a welcome antidote to the riotous magic realism so common in contemporary Indian writing...Mishra has a wonderful capacity for detail and psychological portraiture...
—The New York Times Book Review