comment on style / language

Ghosh is a multi-lingual writer who was born in Kolkata, India to a Bengali Hindu family and now lives in New York in the United States.

Ghosh’s writing style in The Hungry Tide is very expansive with long sentences and a multitude of punctuation marks, including colons, semicolons, dashes, commas, et cetera. For example, Ghosh uses colons to lengthen his sentences. An early example of this is in his description of Kanai: “He ran an agency of translators and interpreters that specialized in serving the expatriate communities of New Delhi: foreign diplomats, aid workers, charitable organizations, multinationals, and the like” (20). And again in Kanai’s thoughts on his aunt Nilima: “His admiration for her was genuine too: in founding his own business he had gained a fresh appreciation of what it took to build and maintain an organization like hers - especially considering that, unlike his own agency, the Trust was not run for profit” (20). These lengthy and punctuated sentences mirror the narrative of the novel which is also intricate and full of surprises.