#186
Title: The Hungry Tide
Author: Amitav Ghosh
Publisher: Mariner/Houghton Mifflin
Year: 2005
Country: Bangladesh
341 pages
A chance meeting between a young American woman and a local businessman, and their subsequent divergences and intersections, form the core strands of this novel, set in rural Bangladesh. The story's two strands intertwine like the rivers in Bangladesh's tide country, parallelism that is clearly deliberate. Ghosh evokes both characters and landscape very well, and skillfully sustains both overtly and subtle tensions throughout. Ghosh does a good job of resolving the basic storyline. However, the larger themes related to foreign versus domestic concerns, who controls the land, and environmentalism versus progress are simply dropped, significantly weakening a novel that, with a little more thoughtful effort, could have been much more powerful and complex.
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