Rating: 
Summary: Overstuffed Fare
Review: This whirling mix of science fiction, medical thriller, satire, historical fiction, and supernatural is both dazzling and ultimately disappointingly confusing. Indeed, it's one of the few books I've come across that essentially requires two readings to approach comprehension. Like myself, the average reader is likely to enjoy the compelling atmosphere and swerving plot Ghosh serves up-but not enough to go back a second time to decipher exactly what was going on throughout it all. Especially after an altogether infuriating ending that has one checking to make sure the last 20 pages didn't fall out of the book! The story is so convoluted that summarizing it is tricky at best. We start in Manhattan of the not too distant future, where computers sort through endless data streams, requiring human attention only when something does not compute. Through a clue generated by his terminal, a computer technician gets immersed in the mysterious disappearance of an Indian colleague of his in Calcutta back in 1995. The Indian vanished while on trying to track down the truth behind Ronald Ross's discovery of the cure for malaria back in 1902. It seems the real-life Ross wasn't trained in medicine, yet his independent research led to a Nobel prize. Ghosh offers the explanation of shadowy cabal who seek to use the malaria virus in their schemes to transfer personality and thus gain immortality. It's a neat concept but becomes unnecessarily complicated and ultimately lost in the mishmash of subtexts on identity, empire, and culture-not to mention the labyrinthine structure of the telling. To Ghosh's credit, the descriptions of rundown future Manhattan, the teeming life of contemporary Calcutta, and turn of the century colonial India are all first rate. It's just a shame that the complicated narrative, with multiple time frames and flashbacks never manages to coalesce into a worthwhile payoff.
Rating: 
Summary: A trip down a number of delicious paths.
Review: What the heck is this book anyway? Is it a medical thriller, historical fiction or a futuristic warning? A ghost story? The unusual historical aspects of Amitav Ghosh's In an Antique Land drew me to The Calcutta Chromosome, but what I found here was completely different, although no less enjoyable. An Eqyptian living in New York, Antar's deadly job is to watch the huge screen of his computer, Ava, as it sifts through all sorts of pointless information. Ava is like a know-it-all older sister-obviously as bored with its job as Antar is with his, it is learning to speak with him in his regional dialect (which he has nearly forgotten) and waves arms across the screen to practice its Body Language of the Upper Nilotic Region, which Antar doesn't remember very well either. Then across the screen drifts the tattered I.D. tag of a former co-worker of Antar's, a noisy and irritating man named Murugan ("Call me Morgan!") who vanished into India, where he had gone to research a British scientist who discovered how malaria is transmitted to humans. The reader follows Murugan, the scientist Robert Ross, Urmila, a Calcutta journalist and tales of a mysterious train station to . . . well, it is hard to say. The Calcutta Chromosome goes down a number of delicious paths, some more tantalizing than satisfying. The end is rather rapidly wrapped up and leaves the reader wishing for at least another twenty-five pages, for a better chance to visit with Urmila and her awful family, to learn more about the relationship between Sonali and her powerful lover Romen, between Antar, his village and his computer. A throroughly enjoyable book, but one that pulls its punches at the end.
Rating:
Summary: Fantasy + Mystery + Religious Sects + Science Fiction
Review: While reading: don't expect an answer.
Enjoy the levels of the script while they merge.
The Nobel Laureate Ronald Ross, unknowingly
guided by a mysterios group (probably a religious
sect).
An isolated inventory help assistant, some
friends, a supercomputer (which rescrambles
the electrical fingerprints of email messages
sent years ago out of the earthbound stratosphere) and a Freak-Expert on the History
of Malaria.
And of course the biological vector: the
Malaria Parasite.
All embedded in a tale of mystery where the
starting point is 20th century New York with
flashbacks to the 19th century India.
Rating:
Summary: Slow starting, interesting mystery with a disapointing end
Review: [...]There was a lilting rhythm to this book that had a familiar resonation.
The turn of the phrase, the dialog, the manner of story telling was very
reminiscent of The
Moors Last Sigh by Salman Rushdie a book I have read but not reviewed
here yet. I don't want to make broad sweeping stereotypes regarding the
an Indian style, but I will at the minimum note in passing a similarity
between this and the one book I have read by Rushdie. </p>
Having said that I found this in the end an unsatisfying book. It was
a book of many things, science fiction, a medical history of malaria,
and a spiritual explanation of transmigration of the soul. I found it
a bit slow in starting up, once going my interest was peaked regarding
the mystery of the discovery of malaria and the hidden truth behind it,
however my main disappointment was that the resolution to the mystery
and the ending itself were poorly wrought. Barely even explained, unclearly
described I was left scratching my head with a "huh?" </p>
I don't know if I would recommend this book, I would state the caveats
and let you make your own choice.</p>
Rating:
Summary: Slow starting, interesting mystery with a disapointing end
Review: [...]There was a lilting rhythm to this book that had a familiar resonation.
The turn of the phrase, the dialog, the manner of story telling was very
reminiscent of The
Moors Last Sigh by Salman Rushdie a book I have read but not reviewed
here yet. I don't want to make broad sweeping stereotypes regarding the
an Indian style, but I will at the minimum note in passing a similarity
between this and the one book I have read by Rushdie.
Having said that I found this in the end an unsatisfying book. It was
a book of many things, science fiction, a medical history of malaria,
and a spiritual explanation of transmigration of the soul. I found it
a bit slow in starting up, once going my interest was peaked regarding
the mystery of the discovery of malaria and the hidden truth behind it,
however my main disappointment was that the resolution to the mystery
and the ending itself were poorly wrought. Barely even explained, unclearly
described I was left scratching my head with a "huh?"
I don't know if I would recommend this book, I would state the caveats
and let you make your own choice.
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