The Hungry Tide: A Novel

Perhaps if I had read this book ten years ago, or forty years hence, I would probably have a much nicer opinion. This book was recommended to me while I was journeying through the Sunderbans (the environment that this book is set in). At the time, we were on the water for 12-16 hours, so I would have had the time to read something as taxing as this. But unfortunately now I am in the place where I must be "less forgiving of trespass on my time", and I found that a book without a plot 60% of the way in is not something I have the privilege to enjoy. This entire work was an example of indulgence. The prose is so rich that it precipitates a cognitive indigestion. There's a lot of research that has gone into writing this book, but my question is also, why? What is the point of this book supposed to be, because there are so many extraneous tangents and anecdotes that it is hard to focus on what's going on. Kind of your classic garrulous Bengali uncle. The structuring of the characters reeks of the Bengali indulgence in intellectual posturing and masturbation rather than any meaningful execution. The two women who are actual go-getters are derided by their own spouses, judged by their menfolk to be lesser and yet entire chapters are devoted to the ramblings of a has-been retired professor who didn't even have the mental temperament to stand for his own ideals.There's another indulgence by the editor. Entire chapters delve Melville-esque into habits of river dolphins, marine navigation, geological formations and local folklore. And this isn't the worst of it, but it really slows the pacing down. These parts actually form the most atmospheric and pleasant parts of reading this book. If anything, I would gladly read a non-fiction book written with the same degree of storytelling effort.The characters, good lord. Insufferable. The style of storytelling definitely didn't help either. If all the exposition and adjectives and adverbs are being spoonfed to me then how am I supposed to make my own inferences about the characters? What kind of author would force their readers to accept characters as stereotypical cardboard cutouts dangled as marionettes? What kind of editor would let so many rhetorical questions slide? Not I, that's for sure.All in all, the pacing is bad but the researched bits are amazing. The characters are mostly annoying and their arcs are not fun to follow because there's no stakes to the plot.

I had sometimes a little bit of a problem with the names since sometimes last and other times first names were used, but that is just me. I have always sort of been bad with names. However, the story deals with the communities in the Sundarbans, a large delta region in southern India. A young woman scientist from England but of Indian parentage wants to study a special species of dolphins. One learns about the different people living in that area and what they have to deal with. The scientist uses the help of a fisherman who does not speak English but knows a lot about the sea life and its movements and they manage to understand each other. She does not speak any of the Indian languages. The end is quite dramatic. I have never read it in such gripping detail, but I do not want to spoil what happens. Just read the book.

Among the 20 something books I read last semester, this book is the most lyrical and beautifully written. I am going to read some of his books this semester for fun. The novel tells an adventure of an American Marine Biology student who met an interesting Bengali translator in research of his uncle's lost years which will reveal a great injustice. This is more than a Conservationist struggle in rural India on how do you balance saving the tigers, the livelihood of the people, other less popular animals, with economic, religious, social and political realities of today? This novel is a great question today and I wish it would be brought to the screen, but not in a Hollywood big style, but documentary tone reflecting the author's message. I hope the author will demand that in the contract.

I love books about far-away places, but India in particular. I learned about Amitav Gosh through an interview he gave to some magazine and so started reading his books. This book has all the elements to be a Great novel. He's done the research, develops all the big themes (love, death, politics, social structure etc), but it all feels a tad too 'constructed'. He forces all the stuff he learned through his research trips into the book at places where there not needed, and in a far too obvious manner. Then there is the story beside the story (Nirmal's notebook), which - craftly so - runs parallel to the main story at first but more and more joins this main story line at a common point. This is well put together, but it fails to inspire in that you keep waiting for the "big revelation" from that notebook which you expect to bear the impact on the final unraveling of the plot. But this doesn't happen. You know Kusum is going to die and you know Fokir is her son etc etc. So I really don't understand the point of this notebook, especially when it's mentioned already very early in the story where Gosh creates a big pooha about it - the secret writings that force Kanai to travel to the sundurbans. In the end the story is very very thin. You expect some dramatic event to pop up soon, and there a few minor ones but none of them is essential enough to the plot structure. I kept being "hungry" for a big story like e.g. The God of Small Things.

This 'Sheroe's' epic journey entangles the emotionally muddy heart like the roots of a tidal mangrove swamp. Plot momentum builds carefully and consistently to a fever pitch that will have you clinging to every word. Told from the viewpoints of several remarkable characters, the story unfolds with a traveler's lexicon of language to a place of unpredictable severity and heartwarming humanity.

The story line was good and the characters interesting. And I also learned a lot — not only about the slew of tiny islands off India’s coast — but also quite a bit about the culture of the residents of these tiny isles. Warning: the part about the killing of the tiger was quite graphic.

How can a book based in such an exotic, wild and amazing ecological environment yield such a boring story? Ghosh achieves this incredible feat by creating two main characters the reader gives not one jot about. One is a sleazy lothario and the other a morose American looking for dolphins in the Sundarbans. The character development was next to nothing but there were plenty of paragraphs on how a cetacean study is carried out. I hate finished the book and wouldn't pick up another book by this author in all honesty.

Amitav Ghosh is a wonderful storyteller – this is not the first book of his I have read. He evokes a sense of place such that you feel as if you are there, or at least want to go there. He also creates characters you care about, imperfections and all, who make waves, pushing the story along, that are eddies of the currents of class, race, culture and social history that in turn carry them. You cannot say they are representative of this or that; they are too 3D for that. But this reader nonetheless gets from Ghosh a sense of historical context and movement, and, in this book in particular, how the geography shapes the human story. Writing in English, he honestly explores the contradictions of colonialism and its legacy, as well as the suffering....

Quite enjoyed this but not exactly a book I couldn’t put down. A few irritating things like using some similar names, kept swopping from past to present and at the same time from person to person. Had to read it (and finish it) for my book club otherwise I think I would have given up! I have been to India but found this book didn’t capture the atmosphere at all.

I started this book fully expecting to enjoy it but struggled, eventually giving up on it. It is hard to put my finger on why but think that it was the use of English that I found hard. I have read plenty of novels written by Indian authors and never encountered any difficulty in the way that they are written and so am rather perplexed - perhaps it is the fact that the writer is American of Indian ancestry.

This was an exciting and unusual story about an area I knew very little about.