SOURCE: “Malarial Dreams,” in Washington Post Book World, Vol. XXVII, No. 50, December 14, 1997, p. 7.

In the following review, Todd offers a negative assessment of The Calcutta Chromosome, faulting the plot elements as underdeveloped and incohesive.

Last summer, in a special Indian fiction issue of The New Yorker, Amitav Ghosh was one of 11 writers included in a group photo of leading Indian novelists. The label “Indian novelist,” applied to Ghosh, is slightly misleading, since there's nothing distinctively Indian about Ghosh's writing.

Born in Calcutta and currently living in New York City, Ghosh tends toward the international. His prose doesn't sound Indian: It's the polished, textbook-perfect English of CNN reports. His books of fiction and nonfiction (The Circle of Reason, The Shadow Lines, In an Antique Land) are set in places as diverse as 12th-century Egypt and contemporary London, and his characters are unrooted, itinerant types. He's less interested in describing...