Status
Checked out
Due 17 Dec 2021
Description
From Victorian India to near-future New York, The Calcutta Chromosome takes listeners 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.
User reviews
LibraryThing member AsYouKnow_Bob
I'm somewhat confused just how or why this won the Clarke Award - any of the other five finalists are at least as plausible. Modestly entertaining, a bit anti-scientific in its outlook, not particularly experimental....
LibraryThing member keremist
I am not sure if the ending is weak, or I missed something while reading..
Nevertheless, the plot does not fill its potential.
edit: after reading some comments on amazon, i've seen that i am not the only one finding the ending horrible.. i recommend you not to read this book.
Nevertheless, the plot does not fill its potential.
edit: after reading some comments on amazon, i've seen that i am not the only one finding the ending horrible.. i recommend you not to read this book.
LibraryThing member nbmars
Why I Read This
I loved The Glass Palace by Amitav Ghosh, and thus eagerly picked up this other novel by him. Unfortunately, it did not win me over in the same way. This book – part fantasy, part horror story, and part a tale of science-gone-bad – lacks the strong development of character and
Believe It Or Not, This Is The Plot
The "Calcutta Chromosome" of the title concerns a chromosome that can be transmitted via malaria injected into syphilitics which is then transformed with a little help from decapitated pigeon heads into a gene conferring a bit of immortality to new recipients, who will reveal to you what they're up to, but if they tell you they have to kill you. Black magic is also a part of the transference process, as you might expect....
Evaluation
I was very disappointed. The plot is annoyingly opaque and dare I say stupid, and the characters seem only to have been included to move it along. In the end, I felt the story lacked significance and gravitas. Ghosh is a good writer. Maybe he was bitten by one too many mosquitoes when he wrote this.
I loved The Glass Palace by Amitav Ghosh, and thus eagerly picked up this other novel by him. Unfortunately, it did not win me over in the same way. This book – part fantasy, part horror story, and part a tale of science-gone-bad – lacks the strong development of character and
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place that is so appealing in The Glass Palace. Instead, it is plot driven, and the plot can most succinctly be described as “weird.”Believe It Or Not, This Is The Plot
The "Calcutta Chromosome" of the title concerns a chromosome that can be transmitted via malaria injected into syphilitics which is then transformed with a little help from decapitated pigeon heads into a gene conferring a bit of immortality to new recipients, who will reveal to you what they're up to, but if they tell you they have to kill you. Black magic is also a part of the transference process, as you might expect....
Evaluation
I was very disappointed. The plot is annoyingly opaque and dare I say stupid, and the characters seem only to have been included to move it along. In the end, I felt the story lacked significance and gravitas. Ghosh is a good writer. Maybe he was bitten by one too many mosquitoes when he wrote this.
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LibraryThing member milti
I could say I've finished this novel but the fact is, I've hardly understood it, and the sad part is I don't think multiple reads of this will make it any clearer.This is my third Amitav Ghosh novel. The other two were Shadowlines and In An Antique Land. While Shadowlines bugged me with its
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back-and-forth narrative, hopping through various periods on the timeline and from various caharcters' perspectives, it was blessed by the virtue of brilliant characterisation. In An Antique Land, to me, was pure joy to read. Historical fiction is always fun, and the more accurate that history is, the more one can appreciate the author/compiler, and the lack of strong characterisation may be sacrificed for the sake of fact in fiction. But though The Calcutta Chromosome incorporates the above qualities, it fails to deliver either strong characters or a plausible storyline.There is a reason I took 4 days to read this relatively small and easy-to-skim book. I zoomed through the first 200 pages in almost a day and then stopped merely 20 pages before the end and tossed it aside. It was out of duty rather than curiosity that I finally got through the last couple of chapters. The reasons are not hard to find: the ending was in sight but the story kept getting more convoluted and fantastical, and with the addition of so many new characters, it started looking like one of those badly made Hindi serials and just exasperated me. I think it was JK Rowling that once said something like, "Readers like to be surprised, not conned." This book unfortunately does not give the reader a chance to understand what is happening, and more than lack of a believable or apparently traceable thread, I believe it all boils down to terrible characterisation.First you have this guy Antar, from Egypt, whose complete social life seems to consist of interactions with his robot-like device, Ava. She can sense his moods, respond appropriately, and seems fond of talking in languages he does not know and projecting lifesize holograms into his room that scare the crap out of him. He is quiet, relatively modest, and does not seem thrilled at the prospect of meeting up with anyone human (his neighbour Tara, for instance, an impending meeting that was dwelt upon for the first fifty pages at least.) When he does come across Murugan's record, he seems to have no recollection of who this guy is, despite the fact that his file is fat with information that he has input himself regarding this man. Then there is Murugan himself. He is described by the author as loud, unpleasant, etc. but the reader is not given a chance to see those qualities for him/herself. All the reader comes to know through the portrayal of this man is that he is self-centered and annoyingly condescending to everyone regarding what he is studying and what he knows about Ronald Ross. Towards the end of the novel he is shown to have a mutual attraction to the mousey Urmila, although she has her own deal altogether and is somewhat in love with the equally self-absorbed Sonali 'di'. When the reader is introduced to Sonali, she is going to attend a talk by a famous man, Phulboni, with whom there is no discernible connection. But at the end of the book the reader learns that this man is Sonali's father! See what I mean when I say 'conned'?Of course then there are all the characters that switch places (or chromosomes or whatever) because they are all mired in this intricate malaria-cure conspiracy - Phulboni, Romen, Laakhan etc..Murugan, from the way he talks, sounds as if he has great derision for Ronald Ross in spite of the fact that he spent his whole adult life studying him and tracing the line of his thought. The premise of this science fiction is that Ronald Ross did not know as much about malaria and mosquitoes as other scientists who were working on it long before he thought of it. He has an assistant called Lutchman (Laakhan) who is sort of like a spy, or hired by, the 'other' camp to give him the evidence he requires in blood samples that will lead him onto the next discovery (or off the track? I really couldn't figure out from just one reading). The 'other' camp is not a scientist of established repute or anything, it's a black magic woman who beheads pigeons in her attempt to breed a strain of malaria (that she has found out is a cure for syphilis) into them. While they allow poor 'Ronnie' to imagine he has understood the life cycle of the mosquito and has unearthed the secrets of malaria, this woman and her cronies are merrily transferring bits of their personality into other people, thus ensuring that a part of themselves lives on (or something). I should not even attempt to explain this plot, in fact, as it was totally lost on me. Suffice it to say that I thought this book, though an exciting and fast read, was a complete failure when it comes to resolutions and conclusions. It is one thing to leave questions unanswered, but to expect the reader to infer these answers without sufficient evidence is too much to ask. Conclusion: I liked it but only because it was Ghosh. This is still sloppy story-telling at best. Show Less
LibraryThing member mausergem
This is a medical mystery, suspense, thriller, horror all in one novel.
It starts with Antar, a computer operator who is archiving stuff for a company, when he stumbles across a burnt ID card of Murugan, a lost acquaintance, who is interested in the history of malaria. Murugan had disappeared
It starts with Antar, a computer operator who is archiving stuff for a company, when he stumbles across a burnt ID card of Murugan, a lost acquaintance, who is interested in the history of malaria. Murugan had disappeared
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suddenly on a visit to Calcutta and Antar's company gives him permission to investigate the matter further. Antar stumbles upon a conspiracy theory about the discovery of the life cycle of malaria bug done by Dr. Ronald Ross in 1898. Further investigation leads to a bizarre story of connection of terminal syphilis and malaria and a secret sect! Show Less
LibraryThing member bluepigeon
The Calcutta Chromosome is certainly a page turner. The supernatural, fictional science, and historical facts regarding malaria research are interwoven to create a complicated story that takes place in three different times: the late 1800s in Calcutta and other places in India where malaria
As a molecular biologist, I was lost in one or two places, when some histological observation or explanation of it was described as copulation. I am not sure what this is suppose to invoke, or what fake science Ghosh was trying to create. I am familiar with the life cycle of malaria in the female mosquito as well as in the vertebrate system (blood, liver, etc.), so to me it seemed that the observations were of the bacteria reproducing in blood cells, but I fail to see how this is (paraphrasing here:) "what men do to women." So this was a bit confusing to me. I wasn't sure if Ghosh was trying to truthfully describe the situation, as he does about other aspects of the disease, or he was elaborating on his fake science stuff; but neither seemed to fit the bill.
Nevertheless, The Calcutta Chromosome is a great, fast-paced read full of parallel happenings and mysteries that unfold to yield more mysteries. In the end, knowing something is changing it (a variation on the philosophical implications of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, which at its simplest states that observing something without changing/affecting it is impossible, and alas, observing and knowing are usually linked, though not always simply or directly), and perhaps that's why we cannot really know just how exactly the counterscience in the book works. If we knew, it would cease to be what we knew, but something else entirely different or changed. There is a lot of wishy washy explanations like this in the book, meaning, if you are a scientist, you have to let go of what you know and use your imagination.
What's interesting to me as a scientist is the idea that all science is hypothesis driven. It seems that Ghosh sets up two camps: science vs. counterscience. Science, as it is defined as the opposite of this other thing like religion or cult, and seems strictly to be what the general public would think of science: a hypothesis-driven effort. As much as hypothesis-driven science is what we, scientist, always promote to the public face of science, as otherwise, it seems that we are wasting our time and faculties on luck or coincidences, much of science relies on luck, coincidence, randomness. In fact many breakthroughs in science have come about by pure luck; meaning, one would work as hard or set up as many experiments to ask the same questions, but without that one lucky break or coincidence that has nothing to do with the experiments, the thing that was discovered would not have been discovered. Sure, it could have been discovered somewhere else, by someone else, in another way, but that particular discovery would not have happened. So to read this novel where coincidences are interpreted as a part of an intelligent conspiracy plot (or counterscience project) is a bit funny for me. In this respect, science and counterscience are not that far apart. In fact, many prominent scientist have expressed their opinions about the fact that if science were to be done only in a hypothesis-driven manner, we not get anywhere (we don't get far as it is...)
Lastly, I cannot help but comment on the cover (the neon red and green one with the mosquito on it): wow, someone actually designed this and thought it was a good idea? Can color blind people see anything? I will nominate this cover for one of the worst covers of any book that I have seen or read (I am sure there is a list on GR for this...)
I recommend that people read this book only in cooler seasons, otherwise one might start itching just by reading about mosquitos biting people... Recommended for those who are interested in conspiracies, Indian food, ethics, and colonial history.
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research was going on, the 90s when a man becomes obsessed with finding out the real story of how malaria was researched, and a futuristic today, when another man is investigating the disappearance of the previous man (or the re-appearance of this man's ID card from Calcutta). Ghosh does a great job of bringing his characters to life. Malaria and Calcutta also appear prominently as characters in the novel. As a molecular biologist, I was lost in one or two places, when some histological observation or explanation of it was described as copulation. I am not sure what this is suppose to invoke, or what fake science Ghosh was trying to create. I am familiar with the life cycle of malaria in the female mosquito as well as in the vertebrate system (blood, liver, etc.), so to me it seemed that the observations were of the bacteria reproducing in blood cells, but I fail to see how this is (paraphrasing here:) "what men do to women." So this was a bit confusing to me. I wasn't sure if Ghosh was trying to truthfully describe the situation, as he does about other aspects of the disease, or he was elaborating on his fake science stuff; but neither seemed to fit the bill.
Nevertheless, The Calcutta Chromosome is a great, fast-paced read full of parallel happenings and mysteries that unfold to yield more mysteries. In the end, knowing something is changing it (a variation on the philosophical implications of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, which at its simplest states that observing something without changing/affecting it is impossible, and alas, observing and knowing are usually linked, though not always simply or directly), and perhaps that's why we cannot really know just how exactly the counterscience in the book works. If we knew, it would cease to be what we knew, but something else entirely different or changed. There is a lot of wishy washy explanations like this in the book, meaning, if you are a scientist, you have to let go of what you know and use your imagination.
What's interesting to me as a scientist is the idea that all science is hypothesis driven. It seems that Ghosh sets up two camps: science vs. counterscience. Science, as it is defined as the opposite of this other thing like religion or cult, and seems strictly to be what the general public would think of science: a hypothesis-driven effort. As much as hypothesis-driven science is what we, scientist, always promote to the public face of science, as otherwise, it seems that we are wasting our time and faculties on luck or coincidences, much of science relies on luck, coincidence, randomness. In fact many breakthroughs in science have come about by pure luck; meaning, one would work as hard or set up as many experiments to ask the same questions, but without that one lucky break or coincidence that has nothing to do with the experiments, the thing that was discovered would not have been discovered. Sure, it could have been discovered somewhere else, by someone else, in another way, but that particular discovery would not have happened. So to read this novel where coincidences are interpreted as a part of an intelligent conspiracy plot (or counterscience project) is a bit funny for me. In this respect, science and counterscience are not that far apart. In fact, many prominent scientist have expressed their opinions about the fact that if science were to be done only in a hypothesis-driven manner, we not get anywhere (we don't get far as it is...)
Lastly, I cannot help but comment on the cover (the neon red and green one with the mosquito on it): wow, someone actually designed this and thought it was a good idea? Can color blind people see anything? I will nominate this cover for one of the worst covers of any book that I have seen or read (I am sure there is a list on GR for this...)
I recommend that people read this book only in cooler seasons, otherwise one might start itching just by reading about mosquitos biting people... Recommended for those who are interested in conspiracies, Indian food, ethics, and colonial history.
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LibraryThing member abhidd1687
nothing as of now...as have barely read jst a page or two
LibraryThing member mcdenis
The intrepid Antar through his exceptional computer seeks the history of malarial research in British Colonial India in an out of the way station in Northern India. He continues his search, makes some unusual acquaintances, discovers ghosts and run- away trains and finally in the end an answer to
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his quest. The author fills in the background with an exotic India, mysterious characters, smells and delicacies and science. A short read with an eye-catching book jacket. Show Less
LibraryThing member ebethe
A bit of an abrupt ending, but interesting and mostly very readable.
LibraryThing member Tinwara
This is one of the earlier Amitav Ghosh novels, that I hadn't read yet. It was a fun, interesting yet complicated reading experience! Its complication lies mainly in the anti-chronological order of the story and partly in the concept of science & anti-science that I found a little difficult to
Basically the story is set in 3 time zones.
1) The future. Antar works from his New York home. His advanced computer, Ava, collects and describes objects from the company archives. Ava stumbles upon part of an identity card, that Antar finds out belongs to his former colleague Murugan, who disappeared in Calcutta in 1995. Antar remembers Murugan as an odd man, who was completely obsessed by Ronald Ross, the person who discovered the malaria parasite. Yet still, he is intrigued about what happened to Murugan back in 1995, and starts researching.
2) 1995. Murugan has just arrived in Calcutta. His path crosses that of 2 journalists, Urmila and Sonali. The threesome keep on stumbling upon tiny pieces of information about Ronald Ross, and his malaria research. This confirms Murugans suspicions that Ross got to his breakthrough discoveries because he was pushed that way by a mystic group of Indians, who were actually after another discovery themselves: isolation of the Calcutta chromosome.
3) The end of the 19th century. The British occupy India, and British scientists work on malaria research. But in the background a complot is taking place. Scientists disappear and others are manipulated by a group of seemingly uneducated Indians.
And then there is the story of the author Phulboni, who gets stuck on a desolate railway station, amidst a flood and is almost killed by a spirit train in the middle of the night. A very creepy scene!
In reviews I have read that the Calcutta chromosome makes it possible to live forever, by transforming in or taking over another body. And that certain of the 1995 characters are actually reincarnations of the 1890's characters. Interesting interpretation. It reminded me of a couple of David Mitchells books, especially Ghostwritten. At the same time I feel that Amitav Ghosh leaves a lot unsaid and open to interpretation of the reader. And that there may be some Indian mythology behind this that I don't know about. I am a little flabbergasted by the ending. Food for thought!
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understand, and which is probably why I am at a loss to explain the end!Basically the story is set in 3 time zones.
1) The future. Antar works from his New York home. His advanced computer, Ava, collects and describes objects from the company archives. Ava stumbles upon part of an identity card, that Antar finds out belongs to his former colleague Murugan, who disappeared in Calcutta in 1995. Antar remembers Murugan as an odd man, who was completely obsessed by Ronald Ross, the person who discovered the malaria parasite. Yet still, he is intrigued about what happened to Murugan back in 1995, and starts researching.
2) 1995. Murugan has just arrived in Calcutta. His path crosses that of 2 journalists, Urmila and Sonali. The threesome keep on stumbling upon tiny pieces of information about Ronald Ross, and his malaria research. This confirms Murugans suspicions that Ross got to his breakthrough discoveries because he was pushed that way by a mystic group of Indians, who were actually after another discovery themselves: isolation of the Calcutta chromosome.
3) The end of the 19th century. The British occupy India, and British scientists work on malaria research. But in the background a complot is taking place. Scientists disappear and others are manipulated by a group of seemingly uneducated Indians.
And then there is the story of the author Phulboni, who gets stuck on a desolate railway station, amidst a flood and is almost killed by a spirit train in the middle of the night. A very creepy scene!
In reviews I have read that the Calcutta chromosome makes it possible to live forever, by transforming in or taking over another body. And that certain of the 1995 characters are actually reincarnations of the 1890's characters. Interesting interpretation. It reminded me of a couple of David Mitchells books, especially Ghostwritten. At the same time I feel that Amitav Ghosh leaves a lot unsaid and open to interpretation of the reader. And that there may be some Indian mythology behind this that I don't know about. I am a little flabbergasted by the ending. Food for thought!
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LibraryThing member dste
A computer programmer working with an advanced computer system discovers an ID belonging to a man he used to know. A man who's been missing since 1995. His coworkers had thought he committed suicide, but the truth involves a fateful trip to Calcutta, a conspiracy theory related to malaria research,
The Calcutta Chromosome is a science fiction book, but much of it reads like literary fiction. Originally published in 1995, aspects like the advanced computer system were likely more impressive once upon a time, but to modern readers the most interesting sci-fi elements involve the fields of genetics and epidemiology. Personally, I found this to be a very creative approach, although it took a lot of pages to ramp up.
I'm no expert on the history of malaria, but a brief research stint reveals at least some of the information this book conveys is based on real events. And the book does such a great job of making it all seem real that a non-expert like myself can't tell the exact point at which truth blends into fiction. For me, this had the delightful effect of making me wonder, "This can't be real, can it?" long past the point at which things started getting strange. I had to read patiently through a lot of long history lessons to get to that point, but my patience was definitely rewarded.
It also helped that there were likeable characters. I personally felt a certain kinship with the work-from-home computer programmer who wished he could be reading when the work got boring. I also liked Urmila, a reporter for Calcutta magazine who has a storyline intersecting with the man who eventually goes missing. She did have one vivid sexual fantasy I couldn't understand the purpose of being included in the narrative, but this was far outweighed by the role she plays in tracking down leads and the scenes depicting her relationship with her family. She's a capable woman with a good job, yet she struggles to assert her independence with a family constantly pressuring her to get married and demanding she take on a clearly unfair portion of the housework. I thought it provided excellent insight into the cultural pressures women can face, depicting them as pervasive and not easy to overcome.
In fact, there were a lot of smaller plot points that kept my interest in the story going even as the main plot required so much build up. I read on to find out if Antar would be able to finish his work in time to prepare for dinner with his neighbor, to find out if Urmila would cook the fish she really didn't have time for, and eventually to find out what had happened to certain characters left on a cliffhanger as the next chapter rotated to someone else. It's true that this contributed to the feeling that there was a ton of information and plot threads to keep track of, but if you like a complex story that rewards you for paying attention and remembering even the smallest details, you won't be disappointed.
In the end, I don't think this book would suit the attention span of every reader, but for the right kind of reader it's not to be missed. I recommend reading it in a short time frame to minimize what you forget between reading sessions. But I also recommend taking breaks every so often to let each section sink in, as opposed to speed reading it straight through. Personally, I read for an hour or so at a time over a period of three days and found that worked quite well. You'll need a high tolerance for facts about malaria and a willingness to entertain fictional conspiracy speculations, but you'll certainly get a unique experience.
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and a web of interconnecting mysteries the reader will be trying to piece together even as the characters are. What is true and what is speculation? What happened to the missing man? And how will the discovery of this truth impact the one who finally uncovers it?The Calcutta Chromosome is a science fiction book, but much of it reads like literary fiction. Originally published in 1995, aspects like the advanced computer system were likely more impressive once upon a time, but to modern readers the most interesting sci-fi elements involve the fields of genetics and epidemiology. Personally, I found this to be a very creative approach, although it took a lot of pages to ramp up.
I'm no expert on the history of malaria, but a brief research stint reveals at least some of the information this book conveys is based on real events. And the book does such a great job of making it all seem real that a non-expert like myself can't tell the exact point at which truth blends into fiction. For me, this had the delightful effect of making me wonder, "This can't be real, can it?" long past the point at which things started getting strange. I had to read patiently through a lot of long history lessons to get to that point, but my patience was definitely rewarded.
It also helped that there were likeable characters. I personally felt a certain kinship with the work-from-home computer programmer who wished he could be reading when the work got boring. I also liked Urmila, a reporter for Calcutta magazine who has a storyline intersecting with the man who eventually goes missing. She did have one vivid sexual fantasy I couldn't understand the purpose of being included in the narrative, but this was far outweighed by the role she plays in tracking down leads and the scenes depicting her relationship with her family. She's a capable woman with a good job, yet she struggles to assert her independence with a family constantly pressuring her to get married and demanding she take on a clearly unfair portion of the housework. I thought it provided excellent insight into the cultural pressures women can face, depicting them as pervasive and not easy to overcome.
In fact, there were a lot of smaller plot points that kept my interest in the story going even as the main plot required so much build up. I read on to find out if Antar would be able to finish his work in time to prepare for dinner with his neighbor, to find out if Urmila would cook the fish she really didn't have time for, and eventually to find out what had happened to certain characters left on a cliffhanger as the next chapter rotated to someone else. It's true that this contributed to the feeling that there was a ton of information and plot threads to keep track of, but if you like a complex story that rewards you for paying attention and remembering even the smallest details, you won't be disappointed.
In the end, I don't think this book would suit the attention span of every reader, but for the right kind of reader it's not to be missed. I recommend reading it in a short time frame to minimize what you forget between reading sessions. But I also recommend taking breaks every so often to let each section sink in, as opposed to speed reading it straight through. Personally, I read for an hour or so at a time over a period of three days and found that worked quite well. You'll need a high tolerance for facts about malaria and a willingness to entertain fictional conspiracy speculations, but you'll certainly get a unique experience.
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Awards
Arthur C. Clarke Award (Winner — 1997)
Gigamesh Award (1998)