Samar, a young man of limited means, moves to Benares, the ancient city of learning, to lose himself in the world of books. There he meets Rajesh, a poor student, and Catherine, a young French woman, who shows him a very different side of his own country—and self. A resonant and ambitious novel, The Romantics is both the story of a sentimental education and of the widening fault lines within contemporary India.
Brilliant first novel, but not strictly an Indian one
I picked up The Romantics expecting exactly what it turned out to be: a novel, which falls short of a cohesive honesty due to an unfamiliarity with the surroundings of where the plot of the novel is based in. But maybe this deduction sounds a little too harsh, especially when one is to consider it was the first novel that Mr Mishra wrote and that he was just 25 years of age when it was published. The literary quality of the narration gleams of practised talent and sincere diligence, as powerf...