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| View Larger Image | The Calcutta Chromosome: A Novel of Fevers, Delirium & Discovery
by Amitav Ghosh
| | List Price: | $14.00 | | Price: | $11.20 | | You Save: | $2.80 (20%) |  | | Available: | Usually ships in 24 hours | | | | | Sales Rank: | 87866 | | Studio: | Harper Perennial | | | Binding: | Paperback | | Number Of Pages: | 320 | | Publication Date: | February 01, 2001 | | Publisher: | Harper Perennial |
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EDITORIAL REVIEWS |
Product Description
From Victorian lndia to near-future New York, The Calcutta Chromosome takes readers on a wondrous journey through time as a computer programmer trapped in a mind-numbing job hits upon a curious item that will forever change his life. When Antar discovers the battered I.D. card of a long-lost acquaintance, he is suddenly drawn into a spellbinding adventure across centuries and around the globe, into the strange life of L. Murugan, a man obsessed with the medical history of malaria, and into a magnificently complex world where conspiracy hangs in the air like mosquitoes on a summer night. |
Amazon.com
The Calcutta Chromosome is one of those books that's marketed as a mainstream thriller even though it is an excellent science fiction novel (It won the prestigious Arthur C. Clarke Award). The main character is a man named Antar, whose job is to monitor a somewhat finicky computer that sorts through mountains of information. When the computer finds something it can't catalog, it brings the item to Antar's attention. A string of these seemingly random anomalies puts Antar on the trail of a man named Murugan, who disappeared in Calcutta in 1995 while searching for the truth behind the discovery of the cure for malaria. This search for Murugan leads, in turn, to the discovery of the Calcutta Chromosome, which can shift bits of personality from one person to another. That's when things really get interesting. |
CUSTOMER REVIEWS (Average Customer Rating: 3.5 based on 46 reviews)
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Just to reiterate what many others have said.... (spoilers inside) 
...this is not a very good book. The first 2/3 of the book are not bad at all, even if the dialogues usually sound fake and too constructed. But there is mystery enough that one wants to read ahead. Unfortunately, a few pages before the end you start realizing that... there are way too few pages before the end to make it satisfactory, and indeed the finale is truly horrible. It's as if the author put effort only in the first 9/10th of the book, while writing the last 20 pages in a rush, maybe to meet a deadline. The ending is trivial, unintersting, rush and unsatisfactory. There will be many loose ends left unexplained.
The enthusiastic comments by professional reviewers are a mystery to me. This is a decent book, but nothing more than that. The huge "conspiracy" underlying the whole story is totally outlandish (I mean, even taking into account that this is a work of fiction) and revealed in a confused way.
What did suprised me positively is the detailed and suprisingly accurate (non-fictional) information about malaria and the real characters involved in the scientific breakthrough described in the book. Of course all the supernatural stuff that the autor added is utter non-sense, but this being fiction it does not bother me per se. It just bothered me because there is non-sense and non-sense, and the non-sense at the base of this story was not very well developed and overall outlandish even in a fictional world.
Anyway, I received this book as a gift, and I read it while traveling, so I did not invest much money or "quality time" in it. I would only recommend this book for light plane reading, maybe after a purchase from a used books stall.
November 29, 2007 | |
Embarrassingly Contrived Silliness 
How this book ever won the Arthur C. Clarke award is way beyond me. I found it amazingly contrived, repetitious, boring, confusing, embarrassingly overwritten, and ultimately a big nuisance. In short, I didn't like it. I kept giving Amitav Ghosh, who wrote the engaging "The Glass Palace," the benefit of the doubt. "The Calcutta Chromosome," however, seemed like a very early effort on his part to write something out of nothing. Yet, try as I might, I found myself holding my nose as I disliked just about everybody in the book, and the "plot," an obscure trolling of malaria research done in India over a hundred years ago, with some bizarre intrigue thrown in for the sake of "science fiction," seemed like nothing more than the ramblings of a juvenile writer. I give Ghosh credit for actually finishing the book, because it often seemed like he had no idea where he was going with it. Unfortunately for me, the reader, the ending wasn't worth hanging around for. I do not recommend anyone even starting this one.
July 28, 2007 | |
A brilliant and compelling read. 
Following the lead of other reviewers, I'm one of those who loved this book. A fascinating and nicely paced mix of genres: sci-fi (which I don't read much at all), thriller/mystery, post-colonialist and others, this book takes the reader economically and fluidly through a variety of characters lives and ideas that interwine around unlikely bedmates of ideas: malaria, cyber-avatars, pukkha British colonialst medical dilettantes, emigree life, mysticism and the supernatural, and phantom trains. Ghosh is a brilliant writer: always surprising, complex but always captivating to read. The scenes at the rail station and at Ross' old resisdence in Calcutta are unforgettable. I can understand how some readers carp about the abrupt and open-ended finish, but upon reflection, it seems the best way to end the novel - with so many unsolved and unexplainable occurences and coincidences, not only can there not be a tidy terminus to the book, it would not fit in with the mystical element in the book. I guess if to name the thing is impossible, then so it is. Conspiracy elements lead me to compare it to Eco's "Foucault's Pendulum," as does the multi-layered plot. An excellent and memorable novel, one which I look forward to re-reading.
April 05, 2007 | |
lost leads
A book of total lost leads, great starts to intrigue, interesting ideas and insights, teasing insinuations, and no meat to be found. A very disappointing book.
June 08, 2006 | |
Intriguing ... 
This clearly has to be one of the most off-beat books I've read till date. It is an intriguing concoction of science fiction, mysticism, malaria, enchanting Calcutta, quest for immortality and the divine. There are many entwined stories and some of them are set in different time periods (influencing each other) that make for some very interesting albeit difficult reading.
Like most fellow readers, I was confounded by the end and think it is very sudden and open ended (as if leaving the door open for a sequel). However, the difficulty and (occasional) frustration in understanding the intriguing story is richly rewarded by the stunning chapter on Phulboni's stay at the abandoned station in Renupur. It'll evoke vivid colorful mental imagery and send chills down your back, blurring the distinction between the real and the surreal.
May 05, 2006 | |
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