Oprah picks ‘A Fine Balance’
November 30, 2001 Posted: 10:51 AM EST (1551 GMT)
NEW YORK (AP) – Oprah Winfrey has made her first book club pick since her ill-fated selection of Jonathan Franzen’s “The Corrections.” According to two East Coast bookstores, the choice is “A Fine Balance,” an award-winning novel by Rohinton Mistry.
Winfrey is scheduled to announce her choice on Friday’s show, for which the theme is “Oprah’s Best Surprises.” But by Thursday, at least two retailers already had copies of “A Fine Balance,” with Oprah’s book club logo, in their stores. The retailers asked not to be identified.
Winfrey is recommending the paperback edition of “A Fine Balance,” published by Vintage Books, which declined comment Thursday, as did Audrey Pass, a Winfrey spokeswoman. Efforts to reach Rohinton, who lives in Toronto, were not immediately successful.
Since making her first pick five years ago, Winfrey has been on a crusade to get more people to read and talk about books. But September’s announcement of “The Corrections” led to some very unexpected attention.
Confessing that he was “conflicted” about being selected, Franzen complained in interviews about having the book club logo on his novel and worried about his place in the “high-art literary tradition.”
Winfrey responded by canceling the dinner she traditionally throws for her chosen author, and fellow writers such as Andre Dubus III and Thom Jones called him an elitist. Shortly thereafter, Franzen won the National Book Award for fiction.
About 900,000 copies of his novel are in print, thanks largely to Winfrey. Her endorsement virtually guarantees hundreds of thousands of sales, even at a time when business is otherwise slow.
“A Fine Balance,” published in the United States in hardcover in 1996, is set in India in the 1970s, during the state of emergency imposed by then-Prime Minister Indira Gandhi.
Although Franzen criticized some of Winfrey’s picks as “schmaltzy” and “one-dimensional,” few would say the same about “A Fine Balance,” an acclaimed, unsentimental 700-page novel. It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and won the prestigious Giller Prize in Canada.
Mistry, a native of Bombay who emigrated to Canada in 1975, is the author of two novels and a short story collection.
http://www.cnn.com/2001/SHOWBIZ/books/11/30/oprahs.pick.ap/index.html