SOURCE: Aldama, Frederick Luis. Review of Family Matters, by Rohinton Mistry. World Literature Today 77, no. 2 (July-September 2003): 77-8.

In the following review, Aldama offers a positive assessment of Family Matters.

In Family Matters, Rohinton Mistry beautifully colors a contemporary Bombay peopled with characters whose lives are filled with mundane—but no less grand—struggles and accomplishments. As with his earlier short-story collection, Tales from Firozsha Baag, and novel, Such a Long Journey, Mistry carefully crafts a narrative that heightens our sense of the vital life of a Parsi family—one filled with sibling rivalries, lost loves, secrets, and also the growth pains of the young alongside the deep sufferings of the old.

Set in 1990s Bombay, Mistry invents Nariman Vakeel—a septuagenarian, retired professor of literature—as the story's gravitational center. Here, we follow his coming to terms with a degenerative Parkinson's Disease and the various responses that his...