Product Description

A high-tech medical thriller, a scientific quest and a Victorian ghost story - as electrifying as The Hot Zone and as rich in its details as Possession.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #827677 in Books
• Published on: 1997-08-26
• Released on: 1997-08-26
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 309 pages

From Library Journal
Ghosh's latest novel, after the accaimed The Shadow Lines (LJ 5/1/89), is part medical thriller, part science fiction, and part literary conspiracy novel, but entirely readable.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews
New Yorker journalist and novelist Ghosh (The Shadow Lines, 1989, etc.) returns, this time with a confusing blur of science fiction, satire, epistemology, and ethnic alienation. When AVA/IIe, a nearly omniscient global computer system of the LifeWatch department in the densely bureaucratic International Water Council, discovers a fragment of an ID lost in the sea of information, Antar, a lonely, widower Egyptian who crunches numbers on the system in his drab Manhattan apartment, innocently directs the computer to reconstruct it, simultaneously activating hidden resources within the system while also jogging Antar's memory of the manic L. Murugan. Murugan (also known, with a cross-cultural wink, as Mr. Morgan) is a fastidious Indian and former LifeWatch employee whose obsession with malaria research compelled him to transfer to Calcutta in 1995, after which he abruptly vanished. As he did in The Shadow Lines, Ghosh jumbles chronology here, hopping restively from Murugan's feverishly surrealistic Calcutta to a chatty luncheon in which Murugan lectures interminably about malaria, then back to 1895, where Victorian scientists stumble on a Calcutta cabal in which individuals biologically transfer their personalities to achieve a kind of genetic reincarnation. At the heart of this dizzy mess is a comic examination of identity in an evolving multicultural milieu, but Ghosh's trademark touch for absurdist magical realism (The Circle of Reason) and ironic cultural clashes (the nonfiction In an Antique Land, 1993) renders the story this time both unreasonable and unbelievable. Densely intricate, logorrheic spoof of commercial suspense fiction from a skilled writer who should know better. (First printing of 40,000) -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Review
"It is impossible to overstate the brilliance of Ghosh's literary skill.... This is at once a breathless page-turner of a detective story and a subtle, profound, complex and enthralling novel of ideas.... Enormous fun and almost frighteningly serious." -- The Toronto Star

"Enthralling.... both playful and deadly serious. Ghosh's novel winds up as richly complex as a strand of DNA." -- The Sunday Times

"An extremely ingenious novel about malaria research, oriental religion and computer science ... The Calcutta Chromosome combines the suspense of a Victorian melodrama with the fascination of a scientific thriller." -- The Guardian

"Well-crafted, intelligent and wildly inventive. To the medical mayhem, add a dash of ancient goddess cults, -- blood-letting in an abandoned mansion, ghost trains and transmigrating souls, and you have an irresistible brew that must be drained to the last drop." -- The Montreal Gazette