SOURCE: Moss, Laura. “Can Rohinton Mistry's Realism Rescue the Novel?” In Postcolonizing the Commonwealth: Studies in Literature and Culture, edited by Rowland Smith, pp. 157-65. Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2000.

In the following essay, Moss explores Mistry's realistic style, comparing it with the magic realism increasingly evident in South American novels.

On the back cover of the American paperback edition of Rohinton Mistry's recent novel A Fine Balance, there is an excerpt from the New York Times: “Those who continue to harp on the decline of the novel ought to … consider Rohinton Mistry. He needs no infusion of magic realism to vivify the real. The real, through his eyes, is magical.”¹ The celebration of Mistry's choice of “a compassionate” realism (and the implicit denigration of magic realism) is but one critic's perception of Mistry's prose, yet it is also a comment on contemporary attitudes to the form...