Rating: 
Summary: Fascinating Look into Parsi Bombay Society
Review:
This book provides a fascinating look into the lives of middle-class Parsis living in Bombay. It's also about old age, and about the difficulties a family has in taking care of an old man (Nariman) with a broken ankle suffering from Parkinson's. The book does not hold back on the details of Nariman's illness. It's also about religion in India and the narrow mindedness of certain sects. It's a difficult book, not for the squeamish, particularly at the beginning and in discussing the illness of Nariman.
I wouldn't call it a literary masterpiece, and I had issues with some of the random events towards the end of the book (I won't go into details for fear of spoilers). I felt it trailed off the final third of the book as the author tried to bring everything to a close and distanced himself from the writing. But you feel very close to the family by the end - it's very engaging and interesting to read. You also get to learn all about Zoroastrianism (which was all new to me), which is a fascinating religion.
Rating:
Summary: well-written but without much payoff
Review: "Family Matters" is a story about all that goes on behind the closed doors of a family home - lust and love, anger and betrayal, sickness and death. Set in Bombay, it centers on Nariman, a former professor grown old and sickly, and his progeny. His stepchildren Coomy and Jal, still bitter over 30-year-old wounds, refuse to care for him when he becomes bedridden. Instead, they send him to live with his daughter Roxana and her family in a two-room apartment. Roxana's husband, Yezad, must somehow provide for this newly enlarged family, and her children, Murad and Jehangir, must assimilate the lessons the new situation brings into their home.The Indian setting is integral to the book: the languages, the politics, the religion, and the lifestyle are all important elements of the story. Mistry does an admirable job of making the setting appear realistic without becoming obscure and intimidating. "Family Matters" has a number of different plots. Nariman, Jal, Coomy, Roxana, Yezad, Murad and Jehangir all undergo their own personal evolution, and the lives and stories of their friends, colleagues, and neighbors are interwoven with their own. The plots are interspersed in an admirably smooth fashion; however, the lack of a singular driving action makes the book less than compelling. After 430 pages of meandering, the book reaches an end. It's unclear, from a narrative standpoint, why the conclusion is necessary or inevitable; some elements of the book's closing appear to be out of place or even random, and others would be greatly enhanced by further development of aspects of the book's plot. This finale seems like a meager reward for so many pages of buildup; pleasant as the book is to read, it does not seem complete without a more significant denoument.
Rating:
Summary: The burden of love
Review: Can love be sustained when the loved one is grossly imperfect? This question is explored on many levels in this absorbing and moving book.
When Nariman, a respected professor of dry wit and warm feelings is incapacitated, he is compelled to move into the tiny apartment of his younger daughter Roxana and her family for round-the-clock care. If you are unaware of what it may feel like to be at the mercy of another's compassion, or to be the caregiver of an invalid, you can get a good sense of the hard work and humiliation by reading Rohinton Mistry's warts-and-all details. But distasteful chores are not all that Nariman brings with him. The tragic consequences of a past love affair has embittered his elder daughter, complicating relationships. And along with Nariman's physical dependency has come financial dependency, putting enormous strains on Roxana's paycheck-to-paycheck existence.
The book's point-of-view eventually centers on two people most challenged by the situation--Roxana's loving but volatile husband, Yezad, and her sweet younger son, Jehangir.
Although he loves and admires his father-in-law, Yezad's responsibility as family breadwinner becomes a crushing burden. Resentment, anxiety, desperate scheming, and remorse all come into play. Novels too seldom embrace the subject of financial desperation--and how it turns into emotional strain--but great understanding is displayed here.
Nine-year-old Jehangir adores his grandfather and almost welcomes the challenges of forced intimacy. At first, the strain on his family is a painful mystery to him, but his growing awareness of the complexities of adulthood makes for a fine coming-of-age story.
Love of country parallels love of family in this book. Yezad's life in the workplace reveals much about modern-day India--full of corruption and horrific injustice but also compassion and diversity.
Like India, this book is full of life. Vices and virtues reside in equal measure everywhere you turn. Compassionate characters reveal shortsightedness, distasteful eccentrics reveal kindliness. There are many voices in this book, and Mistry writes dialogue well and abundantly, which makes the book a fast read!
With all this going for it, why only four stars? Characters were almost always rendered with great care and detail. When character developments, however plausible, seemed short on explanation, they stood out. Exactly how did the young Nariman come to cave into his parents' wishes after he had defied them well into adulthood? How did Yezad's transformation (revealed in the epilogue) occur? And at least one important plot element--an elaborate hoax--seemed unlikely to me.
Never-the-less, I am eager to read more of this author's work. In regard to FAMILY MATTERS, John Updike is quoted, "The reader is moved, even to tears." Some perfectly beautiful moments made this promise true.
Rating:
Summary: Unpretentious, profound and masterful
Review: Family Matters is a must read. I read this and later read Life of Pi by Yann Martel. Both are fine books no doubt and perhaps its not a good idea to even compare these books since they belong to different genres. But I must confess I was left wondering how the judges picked Martel over Mistry considering that there is such a strong human element in this book, an uplifting yet realistic theme and a deft handling of the delicate social and political issues that prevail in India - just the elements that characterise the typical Booker. Mistry is a master at letting characters develop simply by allowing them to converse on his pages. He lapses only rarely into the third person narrative style to comment about his characters and when he does, he does with tremendous effect. The portions about Yezad's prayers at the fire temple are so life like that months later, I still have a picture of it in my mind and can almost smell the incense. It will take someone who has lived a long time in India to appreciate the minute details that he records about Indian life - as I read it, I found my attention being drawn to several things that I have seen but never observed. Mistry makes you see just how much magic a great writer can weave out of the mundane details of everyday life. Mistry is in the same league as Salman Rushdie, no I will dare say he is better, since I can hide behind my monitor and avoid the glare from under all those raised eyebrows.
Rating:
Summary: Universal family drama
Review: I read Rohinton Mistry's "Family Matters" over Thanksgiving, and could not put it down. As anyone who has read any of Mistry's novels knows, they are not gripping thrillers or cliffhanging adventures, and this book is no exception. It is a finely-wrought study of character, family and society, intimate yet epic in its scope. Other reviewers have provided plot summaries, so I will not do so. In any case, plot for Mistry seems almost beside the point: it is simply a device to explore human emotion and behavior, and its interaction with society, from personal relations through family, religious and ethnic community, social class, city, country and humanity as a whole. Mistry gets to the universal through the personal, and uses his own Parsi religion and culture as the medium.
A few words of the little I know about the Parsi community (with apologies for any errors): It is descended from the Persians (Iranians) that chose exile rather than submit to forced conversion to Islam in the 7th and 8th centuries. They found refuge in India, and their monotheistic religion has endured for millenia. The very reason for the Parsis' survival is their insularity, the fierce devotion to their identity and prohibition of marriage outside the community. The insularity also provides many, if not most of the personal dilemmas and tragedies in the book: forbidden love, catastrophically mismatched arranged marriages, impossibly high expectations for children, the need to uphold the community's reputation for honesty and integrity, the contradiction between Parsis' progressive ideals and the inherent bigotry of refusing to mix with others. The elegiac quality of the writing, its sense of loss is largely due to the final result of the community's insularity: a catastrophically low birth rate, and fears of the community's extinction in a few decades. The rest of the sense of loss comes from the memory of a more tolerant, enlightened Bombay where communities mixed, tensely but vibrantly, before "Hindu nationalism" took root, a memory that forms a large part of Salman Rushdie's fiction too.
Some reviewers criticize the sub-plot about Shiv Sena goons, members of a bigoted, extremist Hindu nationalist movement, as contrived and unbelievable. The devious scheme of Coomi and Jal to escape their filial responsibilities by destroying their apartment's ceiling is also dismissed as unrealistic. I would respond by saying that anyone who has not lived with bigotry, communal divisions and violence, stifling careers, suffocating families, poverty, and absurd rent-control rules in a corrupt, teeming city should at least try to imagine these conditions. I have only experienced a fraction of these conditions growing up in Greece, and the schemes ring very true.
Let me end with a few general comments. The Indian subcontinent has produced large numbers of wonderful fiction writers in English (there are far more writing in the major Indian languages I am told, but they are unfortunately inaccessible to most of us), and their ranks keep swelling with newer generations all the time. In terms of scope, type, characterization, technique, etc. they are all over the map. Compared, say, with the magical realism and wild, extravagant invention of Salman Rushdie, Mistry's fiction seems spare and very old-fashioned. It fits much more into the tradition of great 19th century realist novels, from Gogol and Tolstoy to Dickens and Trollope, but more like Gogol, I'd say: the combination of vivid characterization, precise prose, and universal themes through the seemingly mundane adventures of ordinary people and families following a tragic arc. It is great literature. It is also proof that the realist novel is alive and kicking, and can keep at least some of us obsessively turning the page.
Rating: 
Summary: Poignant and imagistic
Review: Like many of his works, Mistry paints a picture of an "ordinary" Parsi character, interacting with the diversity of people that is Bombay, dealing with aging and Parkinson's, and his own personal history. The photo on the cover is especially poignant. Ironically, it's a photo by acclaimed screenwriter Sooni Taraporevala; the same photo used on her beautiful coffee table book on Parsi Zoroastrians, PARSIS: THE ZOROASTRIANS OF INDIA- A PHOTOGRAPHIC JOURNEY. Clearly, Mistry was onto something when he used this photo for his book (he's said to have personally picked it) to create a visual image of his story inside.
Rating:
Summary: One family's battle against fate and circumstance
Review: Mistry has an enviable talent for blending realism and melodrama, consequence and coincidence, isolation and loyalty--all without testing the reader's credulity. He famously proved his worth as a Dickensian writer in "A Fine Balance"; in "Family Matters" he adopts a far more claustrophobic setting to portray a family torn apart and then strengthened by both poverty in a big city and proximity in close quarters.
Nariman Vakeel, an elderly Parsi deteriorating from Parkinson's disease, breaks his ankle, and the injury is the last straw for his two stepchildren, who have tired of caring for him. The pair (quite literarily) unload Nariman on his daughter Roxana and son-in-law Yezad, along with their two sons, all of whom live in a tiny two-room apartment. The addition of Nariman to this impoverished household taxes the newly enlarged family beyond its means, and the strain caused to both their patience and their limited budget forces various members of this previously honorable family to consider schemes and deceptions to make ends meet.
Meanwhile, Nariman's stepchildren plot increasingly outrageous acts of subterfuge to prevent his eventual return to his own home. And we eventually discover the details of the old man's past relationship with a Goan Christian woman, the tragic and scandalous consequences of which his stepchildren--especially his stepdaughter Coomy--continue to hold against him.
As in his past books, Mistry relies in part on coincidence to advance the story, but he is adept at never subsuming the family drama to his plot devices. (He even offers a coy response to those who don't believe in the prevalence of happenstance, when Yezad realizes after one tragedy, "That was the problem, everyone dismissing the possibility of coincidence.") But this book is less about chance and more about the inevitable fate of the victims of a city, like Bombay, that is overwhelmed by corruption and callousness and deprivation.
If this book is guilty of excess, it is in its characterization of Coomy. It's not that her wickedness is implausible--far from it. Rather, Mistry never convincingly presents the motives for the greed and selfishness that cause her to go to the lengths she does to keep Nariman from returning to the apartment she has managed to commandeer from him. More generally, we're never quite sure why she resorts to malice while her brother hesitates in cooperating in her schemes.
But, in the end, "Family Matters" is not about Coomy and her brother but about Roxanna and Yezad and their two sons. The troubles that plague their household are all too believable, and Mistry's novel forcefully and affectionately describes one family's decline, partial redemption, and ultimate defiance against the inhumanity of fate and circumstance.
Rating:
Summary: A flawless gem
Review: Mistry's latest novel, Family Matters, is a flawless gem and is a worthy successor to his equally impressive A Fine Balance. At the heart of Family Matters is the aging Nariman Vakeel who is in rapidly deteroriating health due to Parkinson's. Nariman is haunted by dreams of his ex-girlfriend, Lucy Braganza, a girl his parents forced him to renounce. He is cared for by his children Coomy and Jal. Coomy is a cranky woman with "too much anger" within her to care for her father well. When Nariman slips and hurts himself seriously on a walk, Coomy and Jal transfer custody of their bedridden father to their half-sister, Roxana Chenoy. Roxana's is a happy family with a doting husband, Yezad, and two wonderful sons, Murad and Jehangir. The arrival of Nariman in an already cramped apartment, though, puts enormous financial and emotional burdens on the family. As Nariman puts it, "People have their own lives, it's not helpful when something disturbs those lives." Family Matters portrays the daily play of emotions with remarkable acuity. Mistry paints all of his characters very realistically with real strengths and failings. Roxana cares for her aging father with amazing grace. Yezad, who once dreamt of emigrating to Canada, tries valiantly to keep the cheer. And who wouldn't want to have Murad and Jehangir, two of the most amazing kids, as their own! There are many side players in the story-Daisy, who lives downstairs in Pleasant Villa, and who regales Nariman quite often with her violin. Also portrayed well is Mr. Vikram Kapur, Yezad's boss at Bombay Sporting Goods Emporium. Mistry's love for his old city, Bombay, shines through loud and clear in the words of Mr. Kapur: "Bombay endures because it gives and it receives. Within this warp and weft is woven the special texture of its social fabric, the spirit of tolerance, acceptance, generosity. Anywhere else in the world, in those so-called civilized places like England and America, such terrible conditions would lead to revolution." These words of high praise for Bombay, however, come with a warning against the radical political party, Shiv Sena, trying to gain control of the dynamic city. As with Fine Balance, Mistry uses his platform to make a couple of political statements-a frequent rant against the Shiv Sena and another subtle one against the pro-lifers in America, the "empty talkers" who prevent research into Parkinson's. Mistry warns against fatalism: "In a culture where destiny is embraced as the paramount force, we are all puppets." Despite that, his primary characters often accept fate as the only graceful alternative. Family Matters ends without strong closure and that is just as well. For we have learnt along the way that even in a culture riddled with fatalists, the common man holds his head up high and always emerges from battle, relatively unscathed. At one point in the narrative, Yezad and his boss peer into a mirror and Mr.Kapur asks, "See that? The faces of ordinary family men, not heroes." I respectfully beg to differ.
Rating:
Summary: Unique Voice of a Literary Giant
Review: Rohinton Mistry is well on his way to receiving a major literary award. Shunning postmodern experimental deconstructionalism, political correctness, and all the modern shibboleths that litter the cultural landscape, Mistry has seen fit to write straight from the heart in a voice that creates verisimilitude with reality. His characters are alive, his choices of details are correct, his moral dilemmas are true, and he brings us from the personal to the political, from the individual to a whole social, economic, and living world. He gives us a small situation, a family in conflict, a once vital man now struggling with illness, and he shows us all the connections to the past, to youth, to loss, to a struggle for redemption. His themes are those of great nineteenth-century novelists, of Tolstoy and Proust, and these themes live in today's world as well. Why have so many writers abandoned them for an easier self-indulgence of their egos? Because it's so much harder to be an artist, to write well, to tell a story that carries universal meaning, and it takes great courage to stand on one's principles, to take a risk and perhaps appear out of fashion.
Mistry is in the tradition of Turgenev, Chekhov, and Tolstoy. But he is his own voice and brings something unique to us. He brings Bombay, decrepit in its current state, but with a rich past that now is only remembered in photographs treasured by those who still care, although they too are a dying breed. He brings a family to us, replete with economic struggles, childhood struggles, marital struggles, political struggles, and spiritual struggles, but Mistry's talent is to take us to a far higher level, a universal level where we can see ourselves very clearly.
That is the talent of a true artist, one whom you shouldn't miss.
I read that Mistry canceled his book tour to the U.S. because he was constantly being harassed at airports due to his "foreign" appearance. What a shame.
Rating:
Summary: Poverty does not prevent the existence of compassion
Review: Rohinton Mistry posits that even in a society in which the government is corrupt and the poverty level in inhumane, small decencies still exist - decencies that promote humor, compassion, and a bittersweet degree of compassion and tenderness.
Family Matters is set in Bombay in the 90s. The deterioration of the city is paralleled by the physical condition of an elderly professor with Parkinson's disease. Set against the horrors of overcrowding, family secrets, tensions between the various family members, Mistry fully explores the tightrope walk that constitutes just getting through life for most people in the world - yet he does so with humor, tenderness, and a haunting feeling of love.
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