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Choice
“How ought one to live?” This is the question that obsesses London-based publisher Ayush, driving him to question every act of consumption. He embarks on a radical experiment in his own life and the lives of those connected to his practical, economist husband; their twins; and even the authors he edits and publishes. One of those authors, a mysterious M. N. Opie, writes a story about a young academic involved in a car accident that causes her life to veer in an unexpected direction. Another author, an economist, describes how the gift of a cow to an impoverished family on the West Bengal–Bangladesh border sets them on a startling path to tragedy.
Together, these connected narratives raise the How free are we really to make our own choices? In a scathing, compassionate quarrel with the world, Neel Mukherjee confronts our fundamental assumptions about economics, race, appropriation, and the tangled ethics of contemporary life.
Together, these connected narratives raise the How free are we really to make our own choices? In a scathing, compassionate quarrel with the world, Neel Mukherjee confronts our fundamental assumptions about economics, race, appropriation, and the tangled ethics of contemporary life.
304 pages, Hardcover
Published April 2, 2024
162 people are currently reading
5157 people want to read
About the author
Neel Mukherjee
18 books261 followersNeel Mukherjee was born in Calcutta. His first novel,
A Life Apart
, won the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain Award for best fiction, among other honors, and his second novel,
The Lives of Others
, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and won the Encore Prize. He lives in London.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 118 reviews
April 8, 2024
I received an Advanced Reader's Copy of this book from a Goodreads giveaway.
This book is laid out as 3 short stories, interconnected I think, each from a different characters perspective. I say I think because I gave up after the first one because it was so disappointing and the author broke the number 1 cardinal rule of books and movies everywhere ...
The first short story focused on a man who his controlled by his OCD, anxiety, and general pessimistic fatalistic view of the world, while being passive aggressive and lashing out at his family and the dog. I've got no problem with the OCD and anxiety, as a start. It's great to see more neuro-diverse characters. But again, the story does not progress. It's just 100 pages of pessimistic fatalism. I get that it's an interesting, and not to be repetitive (but so is the book) fatalistic, view of the world. I get that it reflects the anger of an immigrant experience. But he takes it out on all of the people he loves. He doesn't DO anything. The entire plot of the first section is that he's angry and he lashes out and then he .... breaks the rule (see spoiler above). And the action felt out of character to make it even more frustrating.
And look, I fully admit, that I prefer something with at least a little optimism. They learn something, better their life, at start the journey towards breaking their own internal cycle. SOMETHING. This book did not do that. Hell, if the husband left the main character after the terrible, no good, spoiler thing, THAT at least would have been some kind of forward momentum and satisfaction. I may still not have continued, but that's the kind of momentum I'm talking about. Then maybe, 2 stars. 2 stars is well written but not to my taste. I gave this 1 star because while the writing was technically proficient, it lacked basic parts of a novel/novella. Where's the character development? Where's the plot? It doesn't have to be a happy or optimistic . You want to embrace the fatalistic? Fine. Do that. Make this a book about the slow descent into madness, driven there by the woes of the world. Cool. That would at least be plot and character development. This was just an overly long character study. Like a writing assignment slapped into a book form.
I'm done. I can't read the other 2 perspectives. I don't trust the author to come to any kind of conclusion or have a story arc or character progression. And I'm not going to torture myself with another 200 pages of nihilism.
This book is laid out as 3 short stories, interconnected I think, each from a different characters perspective. I say I think because I gave up after the first one because it was so disappointing and the author broke the number 1 cardinal rule of books and movies everywhere ...
The first short story focused on a man who his controlled by his OCD, anxiety, and general pessimistic fatalistic view of the world, while being passive aggressive and lashing out at his family and the dog. I've got no problem with the OCD and anxiety, as a start. It's great to see more neuro-diverse characters. But again, the story does not progress. It's just 100 pages of pessimistic fatalism. I get that it's an interesting, and not to be repetitive (but so is the book) fatalistic, view of the world. I get that it reflects the anger of an immigrant experience. But he takes it out on all of the people he loves. He doesn't DO anything. The entire plot of the first section is that he's angry and he lashes out and then he .... breaks the rule (see spoiler above). And the action felt out of character to make it even more frustrating.
And look, I fully admit, that I prefer something with at least a little optimism. They learn something, better their life, at start the journey towards breaking their own internal cycle. SOMETHING. This book did not do that. Hell, if the husband left the main character after the terrible, no good, spoiler thing, THAT at least would have been some kind of forward momentum and satisfaction. I may still not have continued, but that's the kind of momentum I'm talking about. Then maybe, 2 stars. 2 stars is well written but not to my taste. I gave this 1 star because while the writing was technically proficient, it lacked basic parts of a novel/novella. Where's the character development? Where's the plot? It doesn't have to be a happy or optimistic . You want to embrace the fatalistic? Fine. Do that. Make this a book about the slow descent into madness, driven there by the woes of the world. Cool. That would at least be plot and character development. This was just an overly long character study. Like a writing assignment slapped into a book form.
I'm done. I can't read the other 2 perspectives. I don't trust the author to come to any kind of conclusion or have a story arc or character progression. And I'm not going to torture myself with another 200 pages of nihilism.
March 4, 2024
I’m usually thoroughly gratified by leftist polemics in books, films, culture of all kinds but surprisingly found the didacticism of part one difficult to bear. Ayush rightfully despairs of the market based consumerist world in which we’re ensnared but flails against it in individualistic (indeed, pathologically destructive) ways. He is little more than a cartoon character acting out amorally. In Part 2, our protagonist is a similarly flailing and unconvincing cardboard cutout of a character, an academic poet who has never heard of Phillip Levine, Carl Phillips or Gwendolyn Brooks and who responds with helpless passivity to an unexpected vehicular accident, then veers unconvincingly into donating a kidney to the brother of the Uber driver. Part 3 is superb, however. This is the Mukherjee that I’ve long admired, and it is a heartstopping tour de force. I read it feverishly and with great admiration. I encourage all readers of world literature to read it.
October 5, 2024
Economics is life, life is economics. But no more, at least not in this instance. Opie’s range is daunting: he - he? - begins the discussion on sequentiality with references ranging from Spenser's Amoretti and Sidney's Astrophil and Stella to Claire-Louise Bennett's Pond.
- How does arrangement confer meaning? Can one leave the different strands that constitute a story or a novel seemingly unknit and hope - trust - readers to bring them together into meaning?
- Why not knit them for the reader? But Ayush deletes the question.
Shortlisted for the 2024 Goldsmiths Prize, the judge's citation, from Xiaolu Guo, reading:
"A truly ambitious and compelling fiction from an author at the height of his powers. Choice lays out three narratives exploring 21st-century ethical and political dilemmas. The novel is not only intellectually impressive, it is also immensely moving, and shot through with heart-breaking moments."
Choice consists of three separate stories, except the second and third are foreshadowed in the first.
The first section tells the story of Ayush who works in a publisher, and is father, with his partner Luke, to two children, born from Luke and a surrogate mother. Luke is an economist and in a better paid job than Ayush, who struggles to juggle domestic care, his distate for the increased commercialisation of even literary fiction and the tokenistic nods to diversity, and an OCD-like obsession with confronting the waste of modern-day living.
Ayush becomes particularly excited about a collection of highly-varied short stories by 'M.N. Opie', an anonymous and highly publicity shy (including refusing to reveal details of gender, race or biography). The latter trait, a contrast to Ferrante's self-branding, inevitably means the collection, when published, sinks without trace.
This section contains much to please the literary fiction fan, particularly one, such as myself, who is no fan of the increasingly sales driven / celebrity culture, as well as many nod-along literary references:
Time. He had once read a memorable line in a review of a Per Petterson novel: ‘The only true problem of the realist novel is time.' After the instinctive reaction, not entirely frivolous, 'Of that other realist thing called life, too, my friend', he had returned frequently to that sentence, so dense with meaning, in his mind. He now thinks that so much of the frequent articulations of impatience and boredom with plot and plotting by writers is nothing more than an inability to know what to do with time, its representation, the modelling of its passage in 200 or 350 or 600 pages.
These writers, all enthralled by the self, are hectically caught up in signalling the breaking of new ground when, in reality, they are just trying to dress up their limitations as cool, daring, new, adventurous.
Neatly that quote, or rather precis, is from a 2014 review of I Refuse by one Neel Mukherjee!
This self-promotion though I think is done rather tongue-in-cheek, and perhaps there is irony to in the easy takedowns of modern publishing. When asked for writers who might provide a blurb M.N. Opie comes back with invented tributes from the late Roth, Baldwin and Morrison (although WG Sebald's generosity did seem to extend many years after his tragic passing) and Mukherjee, or his publicist, has garnered something of a who's who of celebrity literary endorsements. There is also a writer in the second part who plays down his two Booker shortlisting (one wonder if Mukherjee was counting on this work as his second).
Mukherjee's own acknowledgements also namecheck some star names, most notably Coetzee, whose discursive, philosophical fiction is acknowledged by Ayush, and implicitly Mukherjee as an inspiration. Luke, representing his dismal money-driven science, and Ayush, who increasingly rejects modern capitalist consumerism, debate their respective positions, often using their respective approaches to parenting and the values they teach their young children, as a proxy war.
This is a novel that rather tells the reader how to read it - most notably parts II and III, which as mentioned have been foreshadowed in part I.
Part II is essentially one of M.N. Opie's stories (although adapted from a story Mukherjee submitted for the anthology and Ayush kindly interprets it for us beforehand:
There is a long story about a young Eng. Lit. academic named Emily - an early modernist, no less - in a London university who is in a car accident returning home from a dinner party one night. The driver of the car is not who the app says he is. A combination of inertia, procrastination, and maybe even an inchoate strategy only half-known to herself sends Emily's life in an unpredictable direction. Everything about the story is unexpected and it is not the plot. It is the inner voice of the protagonist, the representation of her world of work and her mind. Even this is not the most salient thing about it. Ayush tried, and repeatedly failed, to put his finger on the elusive soul of the story. Plot-wise, it seemed simple enough, but the more he thought about the underlying moral questions that propelled it, the more complex and troubling it became.
In fact, entirely unwritten in the story was its chief meaning: how no escape was offered by making what one thought was the correct moral choice.
The story itself contains another moral dilemma in that Emily decides to write the story of the Uber driver, Salim a former Eritrean soldier seeking asylum in the UK, only for her friend, the aforementioned double-Booker shortlisted writer, to question if it is really her story to tell.
But cleverly, in reality Salim's story (at least that on his path to the UK - the Uber-driving part is, I think, entirely invented) is based on a real-life testimony of a refugee from Eritrea that Mukherjee was commissioned to tell, on his behalf, in the Comma Press anthology Refugee Tales II: Volume II as the author explained in a 2017 interview whose transcript can be found here.
And Part III of the novel follows an exchange between Ayush and what, at first, seems the one economist with whom he has some sympathy, a developmental economist working on a project in India where they measure the benefit of giving those from the most deprived backgrounds a cow.
Ritika takes him through a recently conducted experiment in which random women in randomly selected villages in a district in West Bengal were each given a cow to improve their lot. It was a stupendous success: consumption - the metric used by economists to measure well-being among the ultra poor - went up and continued to hold up at the raised level two years after the asset transfer.
Ayush absorbs all this thirstily. It must be nice to work in a field in which success is evident, tangible, in which measurable good can be done in the world. He feels at once enthused and slightly deflated. "Wow' is all he can say, like a callow teenager.
'And it was a success with all the women you gave cows to?' he asks.
Ritika narrows her eyes and looks at him in a pointed way.
Why do you ask that?' She stumbles a little in getting the words out.
No reason. Just like that, as we would say when we were children.'
Ritika looks down at her glass. She peers into it as she says,
'No, not all the women. But over 99 per cent of them.'
What happened to the tiny fraction that was not a success?' Something has just begun to take shape in his mind.
Part III - told by Ayush? - is the tale of one of the less than 1% - although here the question of whose story this is to tell rears its head again, and I found it hard to argue with, or improve on, Anil Menon's critique in The Hindu:
I ended with somewhat mixed feeling on the book. I think it deserves its place on the Goldsmiths list and the insights into literary culture, albeit preaching to the converted I particularly enjoyed. But the literary links between the three stories are relatively heavy-handed, as is the the thematic link of the economic issues with capitalism which each is rather reverse-engineered to make.
3.5 stars, rounded down for now.
- How does arrangement confer meaning? Can one leave the different strands that constitute a story or a novel seemingly unknit and hope - trust - readers to bring them together into meaning?
- Why not knit them for the reader? But Ayush deletes the question.
Shortlisted for the 2024 Goldsmiths Prize, the judge's citation, from Xiaolu Guo, reading:
"A truly ambitious and compelling fiction from an author at the height of his powers. Choice lays out three narratives exploring 21st-century ethical and political dilemmas. The novel is not only intellectually impressive, it is also immensely moving, and shot through with heart-breaking moments."
Choice consists of three separate stories, except the second and third are foreshadowed in the first.
The first section tells the story of Ayush who works in a publisher, and is father, with his partner Luke, to two children, born from Luke and a surrogate mother. Luke is an economist and in a better paid job than Ayush, who struggles to juggle domestic care, his distate for the increased commercialisation of even literary fiction and the tokenistic nods to diversity, and an OCD-like obsession with confronting the waste of modern-day living.
Ayush becomes particularly excited about a collection of highly-varied short stories by 'M.N. Opie', an anonymous and highly publicity shy (including refusing to reveal details of gender, race or biography). The latter trait, a contrast to Ferrante's self-branding, inevitably means the collection, when published, sinks without trace.
This section contains much to please the literary fiction fan, particularly one, such as myself, who is no fan of the increasingly sales driven / celebrity culture, as well as many nod-along literary references:
Time. He had once read a memorable line in a review of a Per Petterson novel: ‘The only true problem of the realist novel is time.' After the instinctive reaction, not entirely frivolous, 'Of that other realist thing called life, too, my friend', he had returned frequently to that sentence, so dense with meaning, in his mind. He now thinks that so much of the frequent articulations of impatience and boredom with plot and plotting by writers is nothing more than an inability to know what to do with time, its representation, the modelling of its passage in 200 or 350 or 600 pages.
These writers, all enthralled by the self, are hectically caught up in signalling the breaking of new ground when, in reality, they are just trying to dress up their limitations as cool, daring, new, adventurous.
Neatly that quote, or rather precis, is from a 2014 review of I Refuse by one Neel Mukherjee!
This self-promotion though I think is done rather tongue-in-cheek, and perhaps there is irony to in the easy takedowns of modern publishing. When asked for writers who might provide a blurb M.N. Opie comes back with invented tributes from the late Roth, Baldwin and Morrison (although WG Sebald's generosity did seem to extend many years after his tragic passing) and Mukherjee, or his publicist, has garnered something of a who's who of celebrity literary endorsements. There is also a writer in the second part who plays down his two Booker shortlisting (one wonder if Mukherjee was counting on this work as his second).
Mukherjee's own acknowledgements also namecheck some star names, most notably Coetzee, whose discursive, philosophical fiction is acknowledged by Ayush, and implicitly Mukherjee as an inspiration. Luke, representing his dismal money-driven science, and Ayush, who increasingly rejects modern capitalist consumerism, debate their respective positions, often using their respective approaches to parenting and the values they teach their young children, as a proxy war.
This is a novel that rather tells the reader how to read it - most notably parts II and III, which as mentioned have been foreshadowed in part I.
Part II is essentially one of M.N. Opie's stories (although adapted from a story Mukherjee submitted for the anthology and Ayush kindly interprets it for us beforehand:
There is a long story about a young Eng. Lit. academic named Emily - an early modernist, no less - in a London university who is in a car accident returning home from a dinner party one night. The driver of the car is not who the app says he is. A combination of inertia, procrastination, and maybe even an inchoate strategy only half-known to herself sends Emily's life in an unpredictable direction. Everything about the story is unexpected and it is not the plot. It is the inner voice of the protagonist, the representation of her world of work and her mind. Even this is not the most salient thing about it. Ayush tried, and repeatedly failed, to put his finger on the elusive soul of the story. Plot-wise, it seemed simple enough, but the more he thought about the underlying moral questions that propelled it, the more complex and troubling it became.
In fact, entirely unwritten in the story was its chief meaning: how no escape was offered by making what one thought was the correct moral choice.
The story itself contains another moral dilemma in that Emily decides to write the story of the Uber driver, Salim a former Eritrean soldier seeking asylum in the UK, only for her friend, the aforementioned double-Booker shortlisted writer, to question if it is really her story to tell.
But cleverly, in reality Salim's story (at least that on his path to the UK - the Uber-driving part is, I think, entirely invented) is based on a real-life testimony of a refugee from Eritrea that Mukherjee was commissioned to tell, on his behalf, in the Comma Press anthology Refugee Tales II: Volume II as the author explained in a 2017 interview whose transcript can be found here.
And Part III of the novel follows an exchange between Ayush and what, at first, seems the one economist with whom he has some sympathy, a developmental economist working on a project in India where they measure the benefit of giving those from the most deprived backgrounds a cow.
Ritika takes him through a recently conducted experiment in which random women in randomly selected villages in a district in West Bengal were each given a cow to improve their lot. It was a stupendous success: consumption - the metric used by economists to measure well-being among the ultra poor - went up and continued to hold up at the raised level two years after the asset transfer.
Ayush absorbs all this thirstily. It must be nice to work in a field in which success is evident, tangible, in which measurable good can be done in the world. He feels at once enthused and slightly deflated. "Wow' is all he can say, like a callow teenager.
'And it was a success with all the women you gave cows to?' he asks.
Ritika narrows her eyes and looks at him in a pointed way.
Why do you ask that?' She stumbles a little in getting the words out.
No reason. Just like that, as we would say when we were children.'
Ritika looks down at her glass. She peers into it as she says,
'No, not all the women. But over 99 per cent of them.'
What happened to the tiny fraction that was not a success?' Something has just begun to take shape in his mind.
Part III - told by Ayush? - is the tale of one of the less than 1% - although here the question of whose story this is to tell rears its head again, and I found it hard to argue with, or improve on, Anil Menon's critique in The Hindu:
The story is told with sincerity and finesse, but it still felt like a performance in the orchards of the unreal. This is the “shown” version of the “told” complaints of Ayush about the perils of “economics thinking”. The story appears to empathise with Sabita and her family, but it presents villagers not as villagers but as villagers-seen-by-urban writers. It’s not a matter of appropriation — a concept that has no place in literary criticism, in my view — but rather, the inability to find a voice that works for the story.
I ended with somewhat mixed feeling on the book. I think it deserves its place on the Goldsmiths list and the insights into literary culture, albeit preaching to the converted I particularly enjoyed. But the literary links between the three stories are relatively heavy-handed, as is the the thematic link of the economic issues with capitalism which each is rather reverse-engineered to make.
3.5 stars, rounded down for now.
December 27, 2024
1.5, rounded down.
I'm hiding this entire review because the only way to criticize what I intensely disliked about it is to provide many spoilers! You HAVE been warned!
First off, this is NOT really, as advertised, a novel - it is three short stories with only the barest tangential connection (which I actually only gleaned from reading the jacket flap - it wasn't even apparent in my reading of it!). I should have known we were in trouble at the first story - I read 30 pages and then the next day had to REREAD them, as I hadn't retained much of what I'd just read!
In the first chapter, we learn Ayush, an Indian London-based gay father of fraternal twins conceived via surrogacy with his husband Lukey (!?), subjects his children to a gruesome film about the horrors of abattoirs, in an attempt to persuade them towards veganism (this seems to be the film 'Dominion', which I made the mistake of watching about 15 minutes of, before becoming so nauseated I had to stop). Now as a vegan myself, the goal is admirable - but doing such in this fashion crosses the boundaries into downright child abuse. The children are obviously traumatized - and this doesn't bode well.
The story continues on with detailing how Ayush, who suffers from an extreme case of OCD, juggles parenting with his job as a (REI hire) junior editor at a minor publishing house. Here, the author gets off several rounds of disgruntlement towards the industry, including some barbs about the very Booker Prize for which he himself was nominated (this current work was probably deemed ineligible due to a lack of a strong through-line interconnecting the stories - not to mention how execrable and depressing it all is).
But what really infuriated me was the climax/denouement of this story. At the end, we learn Ayush has never wanted to be a father at all and has been harboring an intense resentment against the children for altering his idyllic previous relationship with Lukey - so he plans his 'escape' from them all by taking their sweet, arthritic old doggie, Spencer, out to a busy highway and dumping him by the side of the road so he will eventually wander into harm's way and get splattered all over the freeway - and then gleefully skipping off to the woods and freedom!
WTF??? If the author intended us to NOW see Ayush as a depraved monster who has been hiding in plain sight all this time, MAYBE I could understand this punch in the face to his readers - but it appears this is just supposed to be a viable 'choice' he has made to relieve himself of what he sees as an untenable living situation.
I SHOULD have listened to my instincts right there and made the 'choice' to DNF this abomination - but my own OCD and masochistic tendencies forced me to continue on, perhaps as a public service to warn other unsuspecting readers ... you're welcome! :-(
The second story (which again, I only learned via jacket flap) is supposedly a story composed by the author of a book Ayush has been instrumental in (barely) getting published, by the mysterious MN Opie (get it?). This revolves around a London university teacher of poetry named Emily, who, following a party at the home of her bestie Rohan (like Ayush, the Indian partner in a gay marriage - another tenuous thread of connection), is taken on a chaotic Uber ride home ... in which yet ANOTHER dog gets run over!
At first, I thought maybe this was supposed to be the aforementioned Spencer, but this happens on a suburban street, not a freeway, and the dog is accompanied by a small boy - so evidently NOT. Emily, however, becomes obsessed with the driver of her car, Salim, an Eritrean refugee who has been taking over his ill brother's route to make ends meet.
The other thread of this story makes little to no sense and comes to little fruition, as Emily ALSO becomes fixated on learning if her grandparents had started a school in India for poor children, prior to them absconding back to England following the end of the Raj. This all supposedly relates to another theme of the work, which is that economics is the prime/only force behind every choice one makes. But, much like the reader, Emily learns nothing concrete about this whole situation.
The bizarre ending of THIS story comes when Emily blithely out of the blue decides to donate one of her OWN kidneys to the sick brother on dialysis, and NOT report them for the killing of the dog and possible injury to the boy, in order to help them achieve economic stability. So we are now two for two on stories revolving around potentially psychotic protagonists making very questionable 'choices'.
The third, and by far most (grudgingly) palatable, but also extremely depressing story, is allegedly one written by an aspiring writer/economist friend of Rohan or Lukey or SOMEBODY (again, ONLY gleaned from the jacket flap!), and centers on a very poor family surviving on virtually nothing in the hinterlands of India.
They are given the gift of a cow by a well-meaning NGO to help lift them up out of poverty - but the care required for the animal actually has the opposite effect, making them even more destitute. We are given pages and pages and pages detailing the making of fuel out of cow patties, with concomitant swarms of flies buzzing around - charming!
This story ends with the ne'er-do-well father, who has been absent for much of the story, attempting to sell the cow on the black market, which results in his own demise at the hands of thuggish border guards. Another happy ending - at least, thank g-d, the cow is apparently unharmed!
As in his Booker-nominated The Lives of Others, which I gave 3-stars to back in 2014, Mukherjee, CAN write decent prose, though his plotting tends to be overly fussy and with plenty of loose strands/ends. But his disdain for his readers is as glaring as Ayush's for his family is hidden, and doubt I'll be reading any of his other works any time soon (although it seems I bought a copy of his A State of Freedom six years back that has remained unread...)
Now I have no training in clinical psychiatry, and this is only my own personal opinion (so no suing me for defamation!) - but it's my considered opinion that Mukerjee is one sick mofo and should seek professional help working out his myriad problems before inflicting another book on an unwary public!
I'm hiding this entire review because the only way to criticize what I intensely disliked about it is to provide many spoilers! You HAVE been warned!
First off, this is NOT really, as advertised, a novel - it is three short stories with only the barest tangential connection (which I actually only gleaned from reading the jacket flap - it wasn't even apparent in my reading of it!). I should have known we were in trouble at the first story - I read 30 pages and then the next day had to REREAD them, as I hadn't retained much of what I'd just read!
In the first chapter, we learn Ayush, an Indian London-based gay father of fraternal twins conceived via surrogacy with his husband Lukey (!?), subjects his children to a gruesome film about the horrors of abattoirs, in an attempt to persuade them towards veganism (this seems to be the film 'Dominion', which I made the mistake of watching about 15 minutes of, before becoming so nauseated I had to stop). Now as a vegan myself, the goal is admirable - but doing such in this fashion crosses the boundaries into downright child abuse. The children are obviously traumatized - and this doesn't bode well.
The story continues on with detailing how Ayush, who suffers from an extreme case of OCD, juggles parenting with his job as a (REI hire) junior editor at a minor publishing house. Here, the author gets off several rounds of disgruntlement towards the industry, including some barbs about the very Booker Prize for which he himself was nominated (this current work was probably deemed ineligible due to a lack of a strong through-line interconnecting the stories - not to mention how execrable and depressing it all is).
But what really infuriated me was the climax/denouement of this story. At the end, we learn Ayush has never wanted to be a father at all and has been harboring an intense resentment against the children for altering his idyllic previous relationship with Lukey - so he plans his 'escape' from them all by taking their sweet, arthritic old doggie, Spencer, out to a busy highway and dumping him by the side of the road so he will eventually wander into harm's way and get splattered all over the freeway - and then gleefully skipping off to the woods and freedom!
WTF??? If the author intended us to NOW see Ayush as a depraved monster who has been hiding in plain sight all this time, MAYBE I could understand this punch in the face to his readers - but it appears this is just supposed to be a viable 'choice' he has made to relieve himself of what he sees as an untenable living situation.
I SHOULD have listened to my instincts right there and made the 'choice' to DNF this abomination - but my own OCD and masochistic tendencies forced me to continue on, perhaps as a public service to warn other unsuspecting readers ... you're welcome! :-(
The second story (which again, I only learned via jacket flap) is supposedly a story composed by the author of a book Ayush has been instrumental in (barely) getting published, by the mysterious MN Opie (get it?). This revolves around a London university teacher of poetry named Emily, who, following a party at the home of her bestie Rohan (like Ayush, the Indian partner in a gay marriage - another tenuous thread of connection), is taken on a chaotic Uber ride home ... in which yet ANOTHER dog gets run over!
At first, I thought maybe this was supposed to be the aforementioned Spencer, but this happens on a suburban street, not a freeway, and the dog is accompanied by a small boy - so evidently NOT. Emily, however, becomes obsessed with the driver of her car, Salim, an Eritrean refugee who has been taking over his ill brother's route to make ends meet.
The other thread of this story makes little to no sense and comes to little fruition, as Emily ALSO becomes fixated on learning if her grandparents had started a school in India for poor children, prior to them absconding back to England following the end of the Raj. This all supposedly relates to another theme of the work, which is that economics is the prime/only force behind every choice one makes. But, much like the reader, Emily learns nothing concrete about this whole situation.
The bizarre ending of THIS story comes when Emily blithely out of the blue decides to donate one of her OWN kidneys to the sick brother on dialysis, and NOT report them for the killing of the dog and possible injury to the boy, in order to help them achieve economic stability. So we are now two for two on stories revolving around potentially psychotic protagonists making very questionable 'choices'.
The third, and by far most (grudgingly) palatable, but also extremely depressing story, is allegedly one written by an aspiring writer/economist friend of Rohan or Lukey or SOMEBODY (again, ONLY gleaned from the jacket flap!), and centers on a very poor family surviving on virtually nothing in the hinterlands of India.
They are given the gift of a cow by a well-meaning NGO to help lift them up out of poverty - but the care required for the animal actually has the opposite effect, making them even more destitute. We are given pages and pages and pages detailing the making of fuel out of cow patties, with concomitant swarms of flies buzzing around - charming!
This story ends with the ne'er-do-well father, who has been absent for much of the story, attempting to sell the cow on the black market, which results in his own demise at the hands of thuggish border guards. Another happy ending - at least, thank g-d, the cow is apparently unharmed!
As in his Booker-nominated The Lives of Others, which I gave 3-stars to back in 2014, Mukherjee, CAN write decent prose, though his plotting tends to be overly fussy and with plenty of loose strands/ends. But his disdain for his readers is as glaring as Ayush's for his family is hidden, and doubt I'll be reading any of his other works any time soon (although it seems I bought a copy of his A State of Freedom six years back that has remained unread...)
Now I have no training in clinical psychiatry, and this is only my own personal opinion (so no suing me for defamation!) - but it's my considered opinion that Mukerjee is one sick mofo and should seek professional help working out his myriad problems before inflicting another book on an unwary public!
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
July 28, 2024
This book consists of three mostly unrelated stories. While they were well-written, I found them all heavy, dreadful, and unsettling. The endings were disturbing, without redemption. This is an accomplished author, so obviously this was his intent. I'm sure this book is up some people's alley, but not mine.
June 2, 2024
Choice by Neel Murkherjee is a book of three contemporary interlinked short stories. Thanks to W W Norton & Co for providing an eARC copy in exchange for an honest review via Netgalley.
I have previously read this author's other interlinked short story collection The Lives of Others and found it excellent. The dancing bear on a rope image has stayed with me all these years. With Choice, the tentpole titular story is of an anguished man Anush living in London with his husband Luke and two twin adopted children. Anush grapples with issues that consume his being and mind: climate change, animal cruelty in meat production, racism, the legacy of colonialism, homophobia, capitalism among others. He constantly is at loggerheads with Luke who is an economist, accusing Luke of valuing time and people in purely economic units. Whether it's in the domestic domain or in his career in publishing and extending to the state of the world, Anush attempts to make small changes which seem futile, fueling his sense of despair and rage. This and the other stories question how much agency or choice do we really have to effect a change in the world? What is the right or moral choice in a 'wrong' world?
The second story is under the umbrella of the first, the reader can deduce this is the fictional story by one of the authors called MN Opie that Anush had signed. In the first story, Anush had lamented the gatekeeping in the publishing industry and how commercial it's become. On reading this story, he had marvelled about how the myriad of choice decisions by the main character leads to greater reflections about the morality behind rationale. Emily, the protagonist, gets into a rideshare taxi late one night tipsy and the driver careens into an accident along the way. This incident actually mirrors a similar situation my spouse and I faced once coming home from the airport one late night, the difference being that we didn't hit anything but it was close. The considerations that Emily has were ours as well: if we report him, an obvious newcomer, he may lose his livelihood or worse, but his reckless driving is a danger. In Emily's case, that fear came to fruition so the decision whether to report more urgent. As she unexpectedly comes to know of the driver's circumstances, what is the right thing to do becomes muddied.
The third story transports us to rural India, linked to the first story by Anush asking an Economics professor of Indian heritage to write a story about their randomized experiment of gifting cows to poor villagers to lift them out of poverty. This is ostensibly the case study the professor wrote where the experiment went terribly awry. Good intentions, hell. In some ways, the two latter stories are Matryoshka dolls nestled within the first. While the first two stories have protagonists living in first world comfort and working in white collar 'ivory tower' jobs, the third story with Sabita and her family is the most affecting. I don't know if this is what the author wants us to consider but to me, the third story showed that choice can sometimes be an illusion. Determinations of class and the birth lottery, geography decide a lot. The more upwardly mobile we are, the more choices become open. I would love to quote sections from the book, however the publisher has requested that we check them against a published finished copy which I am in the process of getting hold of.
Overall, I found this to be thought-provoking and biting. It aligns with what I think the majority of us struggle with: how to do the 'right' thing, what is the right thing for us and the planet, how fortunate some of us are to have the luxury of choice, how much difference do our choices make within the big picture, what we have to give up to embark on that path. 4.5 ⭐️
I have previously read this author's other interlinked short story collection The Lives of Others and found it excellent. The dancing bear on a rope image has stayed with me all these years. With Choice, the tentpole titular story is of an anguished man Anush living in London with his husband Luke and two twin adopted children. Anush grapples with issues that consume his being and mind: climate change, animal cruelty in meat production, racism, the legacy of colonialism, homophobia, capitalism among others. He constantly is at loggerheads with Luke who is an economist, accusing Luke of valuing time and people in purely economic units. Whether it's in the domestic domain or in his career in publishing and extending to the state of the world, Anush attempts to make small changes which seem futile, fueling his sense of despair and rage. This and the other stories question how much agency or choice do we really have to effect a change in the world? What is the right or moral choice in a 'wrong' world?
The second story is under the umbrella of the first, the reader can deduce this is the fictional story by one of the authors called MN Opie that Anush had signed. In the first story, Anush had lamented the gatekeeping in the publishing industry and how commercial it's become. On reading this story, he had marvelled about how the myriad of choice decisions by the main character leads to greater reflections about the morality behind rationale. Emily, the protagonist, gets into a rideshare taxi late one night tipsy and the driver careens into an accident along the way. This incident actually mirrors a similar situation my spouse and I faced once coming home from the airport one late night, the difference being that we didn't hit anything but it was close. The considerations that Emily has were ours as well: if we report him, an obvious newcomer, he may lose his livelihood or worse, but his reckless driving is a danger. In Emily's case, that fear came to fruition so the decision whether to report more urgent. As she unexpectedly comes to know of the driver's circumstances, what is the right thing to do becomes muddied.
The third story transports us to rural India, linked to the first story by Anush asking an Economics professor of Indian heritage to write a story about their randomized experiment of gifting cows to poor villagers to lift them out of poverty. This is ostensibly the case study the professor wrote where the experiment went terribly awry. Good intentions, hell. In some ways, the two latter stories are Matryoshka dolls nestled within the first. While the first two stories have protagonists living in first world comfort and working in white collar 'ivory tower' jobs, the third story with Sabita and her family is the most affecting. I don't know if this is what the author wants us to consider but to me, the third story showed that choice can sometimes be an illusion. Determinations of class and the birth lottery, geography decide a lot. The more upwardly mobile we are, the more choices become open. I would love to quote sections from the book, however the publisher has requested that we check them against a published finished copy which I am in the process of getting hold of.
Overall, I found this to be thought-provoking and biting. It aligns with what I think the majority of us struggle with: how to do the 'right' thing, what is the right thing for us and the planet, how fortunate some of us are to have the luxury of choice, how much difference do our choices make within the big picture, what we have to give up to embark on that path. 4.5 ⭐️
March 11, 2025
I had every expectation that this "novel" would work for me, but disappointment predominated over wish fulfillment. What purportedly connects these three novellas is pretty thin gruel, and what lies within two of them are several unpalatable lumps of literary porridge.
Ridiculously, given the context, she thought that Hamlet's tragedy had been his inability to find a congruence between his inner self and its outer manifestations with the people in his life. How should she be? Just angry or outraged? Cold and stern? Cutting? Threatening? Formal, reserved, with all judgement suspended until she had heard him out? But what was there to be heard? This wasn't a matter of differing viewpoints or interpretations. Reality couldn't be budged. But here she was, concentrating on how to dress her affect and wondering if it wasn't a problem of tone and vocabulary, of what words should come out of her mouth and how. She knew she was, habitually and by intellectual training, focusing on the trivial, but she also knew that very big things could only be made sense of through more manageable related, yet marginal, things: black holes, say, reduced to equations. The map was never to be confused with the territory.
I don't even want to take the time to pick this one apart; I just want to scrape it from the bowl into the bin.
Each story moves from its promising start, through increasingly repetitive (and quite obvious) scenes which underscore the main character's primary conflict, to a conclusion that - for me - was not worth the wait.
2.5 stars
Ridiculously, given the context, she thought that Hamlet's tragedy had been his inability to find a congruence between his inner self and its outer manifestations with the people in his life. How should she be? Just angry or outraged? Cold and stern? Cutting? Threatening? Formal, reserved, with all judgement suspended until she had heard him out? But what was there to be heard? This wasn't a matter of differing viewpoints or interpretations. Reality couldn't be budged. But here she was, concentrating on how to dress her affect and wondering if it wasn't a problem of tone and vocabulary, of what words should come out of her mouth and how. She knew she was, habitually and by intellectual training, focusing on the trivial, but she also knew that very big things could only be made sense of through more manageable related, yet marginal, things: black holes, say, reduced to equations. The map was never to be confused with the territory.
I don't even want to take the time to pick this one apart; I just want to scrape it from the bowl into the bin.
Each story moves from its promising start, through increasingly repetitive (and quite obvious) scenes which underscore the main character's primary conflict, to a conclusion that - for me - was not worth the wait.
2.5 stars
January 25, 2024
I'm confused by the publisher's blurb of this book, which comes out in April. For me, the book read as three novellas, or maybe, as some have said, a triptych. There are connecting threads, but I didn't see any continuity of characters in the three sections.
I struggled a bit with the writing style of the first and second sections, but really enjoyed the third. The stories, though, are all compelling, and speak to the hypocrisies of the current moment, the failures of neo-liberalism, and the realities of the refugee crisis.
I'll definitely take a look at Mukherjee's backlist.
I struggled a bit with the writing style of the first and second sections, but really enjoyed the third. The stories, though, are all compelling, and speak to the hypocrisies of the current moment, the failures of neo-liberalism, and the realities of the refugee crisis.
I'll definitely take a look at Mukherjee's backlist.
November 29, 2023
A three-part investigation that explores the tolls of altruism. As with a Michael Haneke film, it is a gut-punch that requires of its readers inward exploration and brings to question a lot of pre-supposed institutional ideas around “doing good” from all sides: those who want to help, those who witness help being done, and those who are helped. No one emerges unscathed, least of all the reader. This is a necessary book for the early 21st century where we are all trying to investigate how one can live conscientiously in this complex world. This is a dark, complex, beautiful world that Mukherjee has crafted. It will haunt its readers and poses questions that will make them reassess their place in the world. Certainly not for everyone, but these are issues that everyone should be confronted with. This book really blew me away and while it is a hard one to try and distill, I genuinely think that it is a necessary read for the moment that we find ourselves, and also a challenging book about this moment because it doesn't offer any solutions. What's a fable without the moral? That's what this is.
July 5, 2024
I think this went a little over my head, there are some dense sections talking about economics, finance, other things I don't understand but seem essential to the stories and their themes. Each part ends abruptly and pretty harshly.
Reading it, I felt a little lost, but after thinking about it these stories really make you think about morality and choice in unsettling ways. It's very blunt, a little confusing, sometimes dense, but very purposeful. The writing is tight and intentional. Would definitely read more by Mukherjee, maybe in a couple years lol. These are complex stories and themes that need close attention
Reading it, I felt a little lost, but after thinking about it these stories really make you think about morality and choice in unsettling ways. It's very blunt, a little confusing, sometimes dense, but very purposeful. The writing is tight and intentional. Would definitely read more by Mukherjee, maybe in a couple years lol. These are complex stories and themes that need close attention
September 10, 2024
"Tense" is the word I'd use to describe this read and especially in Section III where Sabita is featured (this is also the best and most affecting of the three).
"...Every episode in her life, every turn of events, brings her face to face with her own absolute helplessness. She has power over nothing, power to do nothing. She is resigned to it, but not indifferent...."
This story depicted how a "development scheme" to provide a cow to a rural, poor family further burdened them. It's the ultimate in arrogance and not addressing the intended consequences of "gifts." I was anxious throughout as I read about this. I saw how each step in the process and each piece of receiving this cow did harm. The author skillfully portrayed the hardships as they stacked up on one another.
The first two sections showed how Ayush and Emily, respectively, are constrained in their lives. The walls are closing in for Ayush, as he is co-parenting twins, shepherding titles in a publishing imprint house, and dealing with OCD. Emily struggles to grapple with a car accident, engage the Eritrean refugee driver of the car service, maneuver her academic post, and reconcile with her grandparents' colonial past.
I thought Ayush's section seemed to have the bougiest, over-inflated intellectualism--the sort I'd imagine of those who went to uppity schools and country clubs, and argued about what the literati were and did. And this sets up the arc, positioning these three stories to culminate in a certain type of resolution.
Constraints press down as all three main characters make simple, modest moves in their lives. Choice seems to be non-existent. Or it is hugely confined and exacts a hefty price.
"Choice" serves the ultimate non-choice in three scenarios.
Quote:
A quick search reveals that the writer, Claudia Pilikian, is white. This strengthens his hand in the acquisitions meeting: it means that newspapers and magazines will be interested in running think pieces on the topic from her. Had the writer been brown or black, they would turn down the publicity team's pitches, because a) they are not interested in yet another writer of colour being angry, and b) they think writers of colour are good for adding, well, colour, with immigration stories, family suffering, family sagas, colourful cultural stuff, but not for contributing intellectual history, or theories of practices which are the domain of white people, or even their property....
"...Every episode in her life, every turn of events, brings her face to face with her own absolute helplessness. She has power over nothing, power to do nothing. She is resigned to it, but not indifferent...."
This story depicted how a "development scheme" to provide a cow to a rural, poor family further burdened them. It's the ultimate in arrogance and not addressing the intended consequences of "gifts." I was anxious throughout as I read about this. I saw how each step in the process and each piece of receiving this cow did harm. The author skillfully portrayed the hardships as they stacked up on one another.
The first two sections showed how Ayush and Emily, respectively, are constrained in their lives. The walls are closing in for Ayush, as he is co-parenting twins, shepherding titles in a publishing imprint house, and dealing with OCD. Emily struggles to grapple with a car accident, engage the Eritrean refugee driver of the car service, maneuver her academic post, and reconcile with her grandparents' colonial past.
I thought Ayush's section seemed to have the bougiest, over-inflated intellectualism--the sort I'd imagine of those who went to uppity schools and country clubs, and argued about what the literati were and did. And this sets up the arc, positioning these three stories to culminate in a certain type of resolution.
Constraints press down as all three main characters make simple, modest moves in their lives. Choice seems to be non-existent. Or it is hugely confined and exacts a hefty price.
"Choice" serves the ultimate non-choice in three scenarios.
Quote:
A quick search reveals that the writer, Claudia Pilikian, is white. This strengthens his hand in the acquisitions meeting: it means that newspapers and magazines will be interested in running think pieces on the topic from her. Had the writer been brown or black, they would turn down the publicity team's pitches, because a) they are not interested in yet another writer of colour being angry, and b) they think writers of colour are good for adding, well, colour, with immigration stories, family suffering, family sagas, colourful cultural stuff, but not for contributing intellectual history, or theories of practices which are the domain of white people, or even their property....
April 5, 2024
I found this a weird book that underdelivered on the grand "How ought one to live?" and "how economics dominates our lives" framing and book blurbs. These are three basically independent stories.
Story 1: an unsatisfied father/husband/editor who loathes the economic motives of the book publishing industry, his husband -- an economist --, and the life he lives. The idea of being trapped in the wrong life (as captured by the Adorno quote as the intro to the story) seemed like a classic midlife crisis setup, but I thought the setup of an academic gay couple with children where one partner realized he hates having children was interesting. Unfortunately, the persona seemed more like caricatures than real people. E.g. the Econ husband only making choices based on costs and incentives. And the ending seemed too stark for me. Funny sidenote: the critique of the blurbs-fame-oriented publishing industry that comes up in this chapter is just comical if the own book is full of over-promising blurbs.
Book 2: maybe my favorite of the three stories. An academic linguist takes an Uber home from a party. The car gets into an accident in which the protagonist gets a concussion but also becomes part of a Hit&Run as her Uber driver flees the accident scene. The rest of the chapter deals with her trying to understand what happened, "deciding" not to report the driver as she gets to know him more (an illegal immigrant who drives the car for his hospitalized brother). Her relationship with the driver then unfolds as a complicated power dynamic that is interesting to read. I also liked the critical reflection about who gets to tell someone's story at the end.
Book 3: the setup is an extremely poor Indian household that receives a cow as a donation, which goes awry. They are supposed to be among the poorest in a poor village. I honestly stopped reading the story carefully after a while because I found the setup very unrealistic. First, it just seems unrealistic how poverty is portrayed here. A household that is able to send migrant workers away are relatively rich, not the poorest of the poor, as described in the chapter. Electricity access in India nowadays is close to complete (not saying everyone has a bunch of household appliances but lighting is standard). Communication between the migrant husband and the wife in the village would be possible via simple phones, which are completely common among migrant households. As a casual laborer, it also seems unrealistic that the woman protagonist would work all days, leaving their children almost completely unattended.
Second, a cow will be a very common livestock in almost all Indian villages, so it just seems far fetched that the household is suddenly overwhelmed with having one and not knowing how to treat it. To the best of my knowledge, it is also wrong that cows are the livestock of rich people, as described in the chapter.
Third, the village interactions were portrayed as unnecessarily insulting and disfunctional in my eyes. While caste does play a big role, there is lots of solidarity and consumption smoothing within Indian villages via gift giving, donating food etc. If the household had no idea about how to tend to a cow, it would seem more realistic to me that lots of people would have been happy to help. Farmers would have been happy to let the cow graze, etc.
In the end, I just felt like this portrayal of poverty in India in combination with the western audience of the book (I bought this book in a London book store) played more into wrong beliefs of it's audience than it did to develop any interesting story.
Story 1: an unsatisfied father/husband/editor who loathes the economic motives of the book publishing industry, his husband -- an economist --, and the life he lives. The idea of being trapped in the wrong life (as captured by the Adorno quote as the intro to the story) seemed like a classic midlife crisis setup, but I thought the setup of an academic gay couple with children where one partner realized he hates having children was interesting. Unfortunately, the persona seemed more like caricatures than real people. E.g. the Econ husband only making choices based on costs and incentives. And the ending seemed too stark for me. Funny sidenote: the critique of the blurbs-fame-oriented publishing industry that comes up in this chapter is just comical if the own book is full of over-promising blurbs.
Book 2: maybe my favorite of the three stories. An academic linguist takes an Uber home from a party. The car gets into an accident in which the protagonist gets a concussion but also becomes part of a Hit&Run as her Uber driver flees the accident scene. The rest of the chapter deals with her trying to understand what happened, "deciding" not to report the driver as she gets to know him more (an illegal immigrant who drives the car for his hospitalized brother). Her relationship with the driver then unfolds as a complicated power dynamic that is interesting to read. I also liked the critical reflection about who gets to tell someone's story at the end.
Book 3: the setup is an extremely poor Indian household that receives a cow as a donation, which goes awry. They are supposed to be among the poorest in a poor village. I honestly stopped reading the story carefully after a while because I found the setup very unrealistic. First, it just seems unrealistic how poverty is portrayed here. A household that is able to send migrant workers away are relatively rich, not the poorest of the poor, as described in the chapter. Electricity access in India nowadays is close to complete (not saying everyone has a bunch of household appliances but lighting is standard). Communication between the migrant husband and the wife in the village would be possible via simple phones, which are completely common among migrant households. As a casual laborer, it also seems unrealistic that the woman protagonist would work all days, leaving their children almost completely unattended.
Second, a cow will be a very common livestock in almost all Indian villages, so it just seems far fetched that the household is suddenly overwhelmed with having one and not knowing how to treat it. To the best of my knowledge, it is also wrong that cows are the livestock of rich people, as described in the chapter.
Third, the village interactions were portrayed as unnecessarily insulting and disfunctional in my eyes. While caste does play a big role, there is lots of solidarity and consumption smoothing within Indian villages via gift giving, donating food etc. If the household had no idea about how to tend to a cow, it would seem more realistic to me that lots of people would have been happy to help. Farmers would have been happy to let the cow graze, etc.
In the end, I just felt like this portrayal of poverty in India in combination with the western audience of the book (I bought this book in a London book store) played more into wrong beliefs of it's audience than it did to develop any interesting story.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
June 9, 2024
I got this but also the three different stories had little cross over, not a hunny % sure what the overall message was even though I understood the point which was capitalism is not the vibe - won’t debate you on that one Neel.
Also I feel as if I keep getting subtle messages not to up root and buy a cow (potential spoiler but also really need to read to understand) and don’t completely appreciate that
Also I feel as if I keep getting subtle messages not to up root and buy a cow (potential spoiler but also really need to read to understand) and don’t completely appreciate that
Read
April 6, 2024dnf
May 1, 2024
4.5⭐️
This novel won’t be for everyone.
This novel won’t be for everyone.
October 2, 2024
I love the fact that this is a philosophical trilogy in the manner of Karel Čapek’s Three Novels, held together not by character or plot, but by a particular theme, in this case the effects of choice (and refusal or inability to make a choice). However, this much cleverer work tries to tie the parts together in a way that doesn’t really matter, but is clever.
The first part is smart, sometimes moving, sometimes too strident and in your face, that is, the old telling instead of showing (which I think is mostly bullshit), in a way that didn’t work for me. But I found the publishing satire enjoyable. I skimmed through much of the third part, a rather ordinary Indian family story, except that the family is small and the choices and constraints on choice are painful. The second part was the mama bear for me, the most surprising and unsettling of the three.
The first part is smart, sometimes moving, sometimes too strident and in your face, that is, the old telling instead of showing (which I think is mostly bullshit), in a way that didn’t work for me. But I found the publishing satire enjoyable. I skimmed through much of the third part, a rather ordinary Indian family story, except that the family is small and the choices and constraints on choice are painful. The second part was the mama bear for me, the most surprising and unsettling of the three.
September 17, 2025
For me, it didn't live up to the critical reviews. I was waiting for something more concrete to tie the three parts together; I had to look back to make sure it said "novel" and not "stories." The first two sections I felt had problems with the motivations of the characters. The third section was a testament to how badly well-intentioned foreign aid can go.
January 19, 2024
I have yet to stop tossing about the thoughts created and resurfaced by this book. It really is a magnificent accomplishment, this novel. Broken into three parts, I was a bit unsure how the stories linked to one another, but I feel that was intentional – that we are challenged to see the connectedness between them. Brilliant.
Then there is the way that the passage of time is conveyed. In Part I, I was shocked at one point to realized how much time had passed in the characters’ story. What felt to me as a string of days turned out to be years and I was entirely caught off guard. I found that the passing of time was portrayed mostly through the life-cycle of the natural world – the true tracing of time – versus the man-made, capitalist-manufactured concept of ‘time’. Brilliant, once again.
And, of course, there is the question of ‘choice’. The parts – to me – were a wave a decreased perspective. We start out with Ayush in the macro-level and how the consequence of choice affects the individual; choices that we are fed to believe the lie do not affect us individually (enter the documentary on the pig concentration camps). We are left to ponder who is the person with the right reaction: Ayush or the rest of us? Greta’s mother says in her book, Our House is on Fire, <>. Is Ayush acting in the completely rational way and it is the rest of us that are crazy?
Part III, Sabita and Gauri – the micro-level perspective – kind of embodied the title of the book for me. It showcased a kind of futility of individual choice; that idea that our individual choices ultimately guide the course of our lives. It lays out that it is really the collision of millions of thousands of choices/factors – regardless of intent - are what dictate the path of our lives. It slaps us in the face with the truth that we are not separate entities from our environment nor each other as dearly we like to death grip that lie: we are direct products and contributors to one great flow of life. It shows us how much we do not know enough or dig enough into all the possible repercussions of all these choices being made and how they affect all the individual life experiences that intertwine with those decisions, however removed they may seem. Brilliant.
So, to sum up this novel in one word? Exquisite.
Then there is the way that the passage of time is conveyed. In Part I, I was shocked at one point to realized how much time had passed in the characters’ story. What felt to me as a string of days turned out to be years and I was entirely caught off guard. I found that the passing of time was portrayed mostly through the life-cycle of the natural world – the true tracing of time – versus the man-made, capitalist-manufactured concept of ‘time’. Brilliant, once again.
And, of course, there is the question of ‘choice’. The parts – to me – were a wave a decreased perspective. We start out with Ayush in the macro-level and how the consequence of choice affects the individual; choices that we are fed to believe the lie do not affect us individually (enter the documentary on the pig concentration camps). We are left to ponder who is the person with the right reaction: Ayush or the rest of us? Greta’s mother says in her book, Our House is on Fire, <>. Is Ayush acting in the completely rational way and it is the rest of us that are crazy?
Part III, Sabita and Gauri – the micro-level perspective – kind of embodied the title of the book for me. It showcased a kind of futility of individual choice; that idea that our individual choices ultimately guide the course of our lives. It lays out that it is really the collision of millions of thousands of choices/factors – regardless of intent - are what dictate the path of our lives. It slaps us in the face with the truth that we are not separate entities from our environment nor each other as dearly we like to death grip that lie: we are direct products and contributors to one great flow of life. It shows us how much we do not know enough or dig enough into all the possible repercussions of all these choices being made and how they affect all the individual life experiences that intertwine with those decisions, however removed they may seem. Brilliant.
So, to sum up this novel in one word? Exquisite.
April 1, 2024
Neel Mukherjee is one of my favorite writers. You never get the same thing twice. His latest Choice is three seprate novella in one at least that is how I would describe. They all deal with topics of race, neoliberalism, justice. The first one was my favorite of the three because it dealt with the inside world of publishing and what certain readers and editors expect from it. It shows the prejudices that are there from both parties. The second and third parts deal with the choices we make in life and how they affect us and th world. While this book may not be for everyone and there may sections that you may like and another reader won't it goes perectly with the title and Choices. No matter what you feel you won't regret pick picking up this book and giving it a chance of opening your mind and being exposed to exquisite writing. It's a great pick for a book club because there is so mjch to discuss tin these three stories. Thanks to Netgalley and W.W. Norton for the read.
September 1, 2024
5/10. I couldn’t get into this book. I didn’t like the main characters in any of the parts, especially the first two were a bit whiny, indecisive, and flat characters.
February 3, 2025
Each of the three (very) loosely connected novellas in this book concerns moral choices, and im making and defending them we are shown some reasoning of a sort. The first two are interesting but suffer from plausibility problems. The final behaviour of the protagonists is so – shall we say – odd, that the narrative leading up to the decisions have to be questioned too. The decision were undertaken by people whose moral agency is in serious doubt. I’m that happens often but it makes for an inhibited debate. The final section is the best – and perhaps might have been developed into a fuller novel. Here the choice is not so much confronted by an individual (though naturally there are choices), as by an organisation wanting to alleviate poverty. Their solution, ultimately, is disastrous, but I was left wondering if it was the donating choice that was at fault or the way it was implemented. In any case the description of poverty in India was very affecting.
March 31, 2024
3.5 stars-Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for an ARC of this book, releasing in April 2nd 2024!
I originally requested an ARC of this because of a positive comment by Hanya Yanagihara, whose writing I like. This book is essentially three novellas (barely) tied together by a short mention in the first story, all of which deal with themes of morality and the choices we make, as well as the dangers of "well-meaning" white (neo)liberalism. I did like that overarching connection and the idea that even when we make what seems to be the most moral choice possible, because we don't exist in a laboratory but in a living society there will often be negative consequences that accompany the good of that choice. Mukherjee's writing is beautiful. My biggest issue in this book is with the characters, who sometimes felt like almost cartoonish versions of what they were supposed to represent. Part 1 was the worst for this, Part 2 was slightly better, and Part 3 had the least of this and was definitely my favorite of the three stories.
I originally requested an ARC of this because of a positive comment by Hanya Yanagihara, whose writing I like. This book is essentially three novellas (barely) tied together by a short mention in the first story, all of which deal with themes of morality and the choices we make, as well as the dangers of "well-meaning" white (neo)liberalism. I did like that overarching connection and the idea that even when we make what seems to be the most moral choice possible, because we don't exist in a laboratory but in a living society there will often be negative consequences that accompany the good of that choice. Mukherjee's writing is beautiful. My biggest issue in this book is with the characters, who sometimes felt like almost cartoonish versions of what they were supposed to represent. Part 1 was the worst for this, Part 2 was slightly better, and Part 3 had the least of this and was definitely my favorite of the three stories.
August 16, 2024
This book starts with a main story followed by two independent sub-stories which are thinly connected to the main story. The writing is good, a tad too intelligent with a lot of discourse on consumerism through the perspective of one character in the first story. The other two stories are mainly plot oriented.
I am not exactly sure of the overall intent the author is trying to convey through these stories. Based on the book title my guess is this - tactical choices we make in a spur of heated or passionate moment, driven by conscience, greed, love or any other reason will lead our lives in a very different path that we may not have imagined or intended. The choices we make determines the course of our life.
I am not exactly sure of the overall intent the author is trying to convey through these stories. Based on the book title my guess is this - tactical choices we make in a spur of heated or passionate moment, driven by conscience, greed, love or any other reason will lead our lives in a very different path that we may not have imagined or intended. The choices we make determines the course of our life.
January 27, 2025
Very thought provoking novel. Three stories some everyday choices in the modern world. Or probably an illusion of choices. And how to make these changes and do good in this complex world.
Very powerful and devastating book . Great book for discussion
Very powerful and devastating book . Great book for discussion
January 12, 2025
DNF. What's the point?
January 31, 2025
Could not finish, just not for me.
July 2, 2025
Kändes ofullständig. De tre historierna hade ingen koppling till varandra. Och även enskilda förstår jag inte vad meningen var med varje berättelse. Bara dystert
July 20, 2025
Some interesting concepts but the writing was just really inaccessible to me. It is probably a good book but not for me.
August 25, 2025
3 stars only because I don’t like books of short stories and I had not appreciated the short-storyness when purchasing this book
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