This one was a bit tedious to be honest. Samar, a young Indian man falls in with a bunch of foreigners in Banares who are exploring the esoteric orient. They do most of the talking while he reflects on their relationships and then he gets involved in one himself.

Banares, Hinduism’s most holy city, is a typical place for Westerners to run away to in search of themselves, so it’s not without irony that Samar ends up running away from Banares and his own issues.

I found it all a bit unreal and very self-absorbed. I came away with little idea of what Mishra is trying to convey unless it’s that we can all get hung up on things in life. Not something that we really need reminding of too strongly.

There are no real conclusions or resolution. Everyone just kind of ambles on in an ethereal and ephemeral way… bit like India really. And, just like my two long stints in India, it all got a bit much in the end and I was happy to move on to something else. ( )

Brilliant! ( )

- Really remarkable in its confidence and maturity; there are cracks in narrative and literary capacity, but maybe not more than a regular author
- Read as PM's biography, given what I know about his history from other books
- All the seeds of discontents/enchantments are there, that come up later
- I usually get tired of the 'samaa bandhna' in fiction, but PM's descriptions are apt and concise, and often, beautiful
- opposite of Rushdie, I could compare PM to Rohinton Mistry ( )

The "romantics" referenced in this novel's title are the expatriate Europeans living in Benares, India, but also the young Indian men who have fallen in with this group.

Our narrator, Samar, is a Brahman (thanks to Google, I learned that this term refers to a member of the highest Hindu caste, that of the priesthood) student who has moved to the holy city of Benares to study for the Civil Service Exam. He spends his days reading nineteenth century European novels in the library (such as [b:The World as Will and Idea: Abridged in 1 Vol|537365|The World as Will and Idea Abridged in 1 Vol|Arthur Schopenhauer|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1388203951s/537365.jpg|41113740], [b:The Torrents of Spring, First Love, and Mumu|5254229|The Torrents of Spring, First Love, and Mumu|Ivan Turgenev|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1328303410s/5254229.jpg|1298622], and [b:Sentimental Education|2183|Sentimental Education|Gustave Flaubert|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1327788473s/2183.jpg|314156]). Before reading this book, I had only a vague understanding of the caste system in India and the lingering effects of colonialism, and I was moved by Samar's fascination with these books and how he and his friend Rajesh were able to identify so deeply with Flaubert.

Every young Indian wants to pass the Civil Service Exam and gain a coveted government job, but the pool of hopeful applicants is far larger than the job market. Many students languish for years, studying for and fruitlessly taking the exam, before giving up, dejected, and moving on. In this post-colonial setting, members of Samar's caste have no outlet other than the Civil Service Exam and a government job. Samar's father is a member of an older generation whose way of life is a thing of the distant past. There is a disconnect between the Brahman's traditional societal role and what is left in this new India.

Samar, through his British neighbor, Miss West, meets a group of young European expatriates. The two members of this group he is most taken with are Miss West herself and her French friend Catherine. I kept getting these two women confused; their personalities are largely interchangeable. Regardless, they have a profound effect on Samar. Their "freedom," their aimlessness, their "romance" is alien to him. In one memorable scene, Catherine asks Samar if he had ever been in love before. He did not know how to answer her; in Samar's mind, marriage came first and love came afterwards; love before or without marriage was pointless.

The plot of this book is not action driven. Mishra is writing about caste and class in post-colonial India. I was deeply moved by this novel although it took me a while to get into the book. ( )

This is a gentle look at a young Indian mans coming of age as he drifts through his education in Varanasi, meeting English and French people living in India for their own reasons, and Indian people from different backgrounds to his own. The narrator has very little agency for most of the novel, he learns from books and is a friend and observer of other people, while being quite naive himself. There's not much in the way of dramatic plot but it's a lovely read describing his personal growth as his life unfolds. ( )