Outsiders are drawn into the exotic vortex of a remote Pacific
archipelago. In a complex narrative filled with echoes of Naipaul
and especially Conrad (with an occasional nod to Peter
Matthiessen's At Play in the Fields of the Lord), Anglo-Indian
author Ghosh (The Glass Palace, 2001, etc.) interweaves the fates
of several natives and visitors to the pristine (if not primitive)
Sundarban Islands in the Bay of Bengal. Marine biologist Piya(la)
Roy, raised in the United States by Indian parents, has come to the
islands to study a rare and endangered marine species, the
Irrawaddy dolphin. New Delhi businessman Kanai Dutt (creator of a
thriving translation business) is visiting his aunt Nilima, and
perusing the history (of the islands' exploitation by "people who
made a push to protect the wildlife here, without regard to the
human costs," and a failed utopian "revolution" waged by settlers
and their sympathizers) contained in the journal of Kanai's uncle
Nirmal, a probable victim of political murder. Matters are further
complicated when Kanai serves as translator on Piya's research
expedition, in a fishing boat piloted by taciturn islander Fokir,
the adult son of an embattled woman (Kusum) who may have been
Nirmal's lover, and appears to have shared his fate. Ghosh tells
their stories in parallel narratives suffused with an impressive
wealth of historical, cetological and ethnographic detail (which
isn't always successfully dramatized). The result is a fascinating
tapestry, in which idealistic motives and carefully preserved
secrets alike are vulnerable to a world of various predators-a
truth expressed in the beguiling legend of the islands'
"protectress" in combat with a malevolent "tiger-demon," and during
a climactic tropical storm followed by a fateful "tidal surge." A
bit bumpy; still, overall, Ghosh's fifth is one of his most
interesting. (Kirkus Reviews)
Fom the author of The Glass Palace, the widely-acclaimed
bestseller. The Hungry Tide is a rich, exotic saga set in Calcutta
and in the vast archipelago of islands in the Bay of Bengal. An
Indian myth says that when the river Ganges first descended from
the heavens, the force of the cascade was so great that the earth
would have been destroyed if it had not been for the god Shiva, who
tamed the torrent by catching it in his dreadlocks. It is only when
the Ganges approaches the Bay of Bengal that it frees itself and
separates into thousands of wandering strands. The result is the
Sundarbans, an immense stretch of mangrove forest, a half-drowned
land where the waters of the Himalayas merge with the incoming
tides of the sea. It is this vast archipelago of islands that
provides the setting for Amitav Ghosh's new novel. In the
Sundarbans the tides reach more than 100 miles inland and every day
thousands of hectares of forest disappear only to re-emerge hours
later. Dense as the mangrove forests are, from a human point of
view it is only a little less barren than a desert. snakes, sharks
and man-eating tigers. This is the only place on earth where man is
more often prey than predator. And it is into this terrain that an
eccentric, wealthy Scotsman named Daniel Hamilton tried to create a
utopian society, of all races and religions, and conquer the might
of the Sundarbans. In January 2001, a small ship arrives to conduct
an ecological survey of this vast but little-known environment, and
the scientists on board begin to trace the journeys of the
descendants of this society.
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