Book Review: A Suitable Boy, by Vikram Seth (1993)
The first thing you should be aware about this book is its length, which is considerable – 1,474 pages, to be precise. That’s with small print, meaning there’s a lot of words on each of those pages. Towards the end, one of the characters, Amit, a budding poet and novelist, states his dislike of overly long books. His reasoning is that if the book is bad it is an unnecessary waste of time, and if it is good, the reader becomes a social recluse. This, presumably, was intended to be ironic. A Suit able Boy is not a bad book, nor did it turn me into a recluse. Rather, it took me a very long time to read, well over a year. As a rule, long books appeal to me, possibly simply for the challenge they present. I’m not a fast reader, but I generally get to the end of any book I start (even if other books come in between). In this case, the start was very slow, which possibly helped, as there are many characters to become familiar with, and their Indian names need repeating several ti...