The Shadow Lines

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The Shadow Lines is a novel by Amitav Ghosh, published 1988.

A book that so well captures the perspectival view of time and events, of lines that bring people together and hold them apart, lines that are clearly visible on one perspective and nonexistent on another, lines that exist in the memory of one, and therefore in another's imagination. A narrative built out of an intricate, constantly criss-crossing web of memories of many people, it never pretends to tell a story. Rather it invites the reader to invent one, out of the memories of those involved, memories that hold mirrors of differing shades to the same experience.

[edit] Plot summary

The book chronicles one series of events lived differently by different people. The narrator has this unusual fascination for his second-uncle, Tridib, the eldest son of an Indian diplomat abroad, Tridib who never "lives" the story, except through memories of others -- the narrator's, brother Robi's, and lover May's. He is a link that connects them, a shadow line that never materialises. Beginning with the narrator's memories of his early interactions with Tridib, who had "given me eyes" to see the world with, the narrative keeps travelling back and forth in time as well as space, moving along with the train of thoughts that shift wildly from Calcutta's Gole Park to Ballygunge, and farther into London's Brick Lane of the War, or Lymington Road of today. The outlines of these places are as vivid to the reader as to those who lived in them, or those who didn't actually live in them, but could nevertheless invent them through memories of those who did. The lines that divide places and even times are mere shadows, and hence forever trespassed.