The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga

Another Booker prize winner, but… not quite where it should have been. Now maybe this is because Adiga has (in my mind) big shoes to fill. Big indeed. And he strives mightily at his task. We’ve got the obligatory framework story (open letter to Wu Jintao), an unreliable narrator (criminally negligent, you might even say), a lot of (bitter) thought about the role of colonialist countries in the formation of the crappy plight of the poor in the developing world. There’s also at least a little clever wordplay. Somehow though, the whole just falls a little short. I’m promised an Indian Palahniuk and I get a petty schemer instead.

Adiga tells us of a “truer” India. It’s a place of filth, lies, deceit, prostitution, degradation of every sort, in which a teeming amoral populace strives to put their boots on the head of the person beneath them. His Ganges teems with sewage and the corpses of the dead. The streets of Mumbai and Bangalore are filled with dead children gnawed on by rats. Our narrator – well, he’s an enterprising lad to be sure – don’t trust him for a minute.

It’s not this darkness that bothers me. Indeed no, I understand very well that Adiga is playing his part in the creation of the mural of English writing Indian fiction. First we had the fictionalized, idealized imposition of an external narrative of the subcontinent. This was the Raj Quartet era of fiction about India – emeralds, elephants, the exotic beauty of the tiger and the kama sutra. (Rudyard Kipling wrote in this tradition even earlier, I suppose.) Later, we get Rushdie, Vikram Chandra, (we’ll even be generous and include) Jhumpa Lahiri, and the like. They told us something closer to the truth, maybe. It was still gilded and fantastic, but at least it was an authentic worldview, albeit from those from the upper classes of Mumbai who managed to get western educated. Theirs was a multitude of voices, hyper educated and as attuned to the nuance of language as only a polyglot can be.

And then comes Adiga like a graffiti artist coming along to scratch in grubby coal atop the highbrow oil paintings of old masters. “No, no,” he writes. “Fuck you guys. This isn’t my India that you write about. It’s as big a pack of lies as the narratives of the imperialist swine. Your education and erudition might make you sound smart, but it’s made you forget what it’s really like out here in the darkness. Let me tell you a truer story, about filth and poverty and corruption lies and murder. ‘Cause that’s India. At least it is to me.”

And that’s the story you get from the White Tiger. It’s interesting, especially taken in the context I’ve just described. It’s even an excellent novel, perhaps. But a Booker Prize? Well… For that, I need to be shocked, dazzled, enlightened, or at least two of the three.

However, I’d read Adiga again, if only because his voice is (to me) fresh.

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

I just finished Never Let Me Go in the car on the way back from lunch. The grey Burnaby day outside was blustery, blowing trash around just like in the dreary closing scene of the novel, supposedly somewhere in the fields outside of Norfolk.I was moved by this book, never quite to real tears, though the sentiment was there; but part of that might just have been my hangover.

Never Let Me Go was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2005, and I'd heard a few good things about it, so last weekend while I was stranded at the Brentwood mall I picked up a copy. The novel is an elegaic look at the lives of three students of a special boarding school in England. It focuses on their adolescence and young adulthood. There's a subtle love triangle, and a lot of attention to the nuances of gestures, intonation, and other minute details of conversations. By honing in on this emotional minutae, Ishiguro keeps the real emotional punch of the novel always at a discreet arm's length. Because these children are not ordinary. They are clones, though the word is never specifically used, created to act as organ donors later in life. Eventually, they will each 'donate' enough organs that they 'complete' having sacrificed themselves to better the lives of a world that cloisters them away so it can pretend they don't exist.

The novel seldom directly spells out all of the above, choosing instead to perform a patient, carefully controlled reveal on the lives of Ruth, Tommy, and Kathy, the novel's protagonist. In practice this plays out like a cross between The Remains of the Day and Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. Ishiguro's novel is almost Victorian in it's sublimation of emotion and big picture details. It frequently reads like a drama of manners. It's no accident, in fact, that Kathy's school project is on "Victorian literature" - Ishiguro is likely the master of the modern form of this genre.

I thought several times about Lynn while reading this book, never quite sure why. It wasn’t until I finally asked her about it that she reminded me she'd read and posted a review of it on her fine site: On the Nightstand here http://onthenightstand.blogspot.com/ - in rereading her comments on the book, I find that I didn't necessarily agree with her rather cold assesment: "But it didn't grab me the way I thought it would. I wanted someone in this book to get angry at the situation, or at the hand that life had dealt them, and no one did. Which kinda implies that if you can't get excited about it, why should I?" I guess I was moved by the story, and impressed by it's use of subtlety and lack of emotional outburst. In some ways, it was these character's lack of awareness of the tragedy of their situation that made it all the sadder.

I'd be remiss if I didn't also point out that behind the stage prop of clones and organ harvesting, this was basically a tale of love deferred. It could apply to any of us. Though the end of our lives aren't scheduled for termination in accordance with the needs of a public hungry for our innards, we are all on the same clock that Ruth, Tommy and Kathy are. Your life will tick away, you will watch the people you care about get sick and die before you can ever say to them everything you wanted to say, and eventually, you too will die either alone or leaving someone else alone. Don't ask for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for you.

-tf

Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie

O fantastical novel! O skilled and tremendous writer! O fortunate and blessed reader! There is likely no finer use of time or shelf space than to write, to read, or to own this novel. From Parvati the Witch, to the Monkey, to Jamila Singer, to Taj the Boatman, to the Kolonyos Kid, to Wm. Methwold, to the magicians of the ghetto, to the litereally hundreds of other characters who dance and float through this unique narrative, there is scarcely a wasted word, and seldom a character that I will ever forget.

In case it's unclear, I loved this book. Structurally, it is a novel, written in the last days of a dying man's life, told to an audience whose role becomes more clear throughout the course. It begins, in a sense, where it ends. The book is a masterpiece of framework stories, and a fine work of history tambien.

The superficial narrative recounts the biography of the narrator, Saleem Sanai, a young man born at the stroke of midnight on the date India gained indipendence from Gr. Britan. The makers of Forrest Gump mast assuredly borrowed from this novel, written in 1981. For throughout the book, Saleem's life and fortunes are tied inexorably to the history and those important events which shape his native land.

I could go on for hours about this book, and wish deeply that I had someone with which to discuss it's linguistic playfulness, it's structural elegance, it's wit, it's com- and it's -passion. Salmon Rushdie is a storyteller and a writer of the first order.

I'll be lucky to read another book this good this year.