The White Tiger

Aravind Adiga. Free Press. 2008

To sum up - in the old days there were one thousand castes and destinies in India. These days, there are just two castes: Men with Big Bellies, and Men with Small Bellies.

And only two destinies: eat or get eaten up. p.64

Booker Prize winner. Involving story, painfully true, about life and death, horror and terror in the 'Darkness'- the poor half of India. Habits of servitude, anger and dependence, so easy to imagine, are aptly described and inhabited. Corruption of civilization, especially in politics is mercilessly noticed. 

The White Tiger is an (anti) hero, with a full range of emotions and motives. I felt pity, sympathy, almost kinship for him. An admirable writing achievement, for a murderer. Most of the characters are not good nor respectable. In their midst, we get to know the White Tiger well and he appears respectable. Although his conscience is not clear it is well examined. The pervasive ridiculous corruption around him, lends him a certain purity.

Clever use of repetition to highlight injustice. Key visual after controversial events, such as comparing the death by murder to that of untreated TB. Built like a legal defence of the White Tiger's innocence.

The Enchantress of Florence

Salman Rushdie. 2008. Jonathan Cape, London.

The best book of the year so far. I love the story telling, the fantasy, the richness of the language. The stories are from the Mughal Empire and the Medici court in Florence in the 1500's, and ofcourse these meet. 

The story was completely untrue, but the untruth  of untrue stories could sometimes be of service in the real world, and it was tales of this sort-improvised versions of the endless stream of stories he had learned from his friend Ago Vespucci-that saved little Nino Arhgalia's own neck after he was found hiding under a bunk in the forecastle of the flagship of Andrea Doria's fleet. p.168

Something quarrelsome rose out of the story, a green stenchy wisp of discord floated up out of the tale and infected the women of Sikri, so that reports began to reach the palace of the bitter quarrels between previously loving sisters, suspicions and accusations, irreparable breaches and bitter estrangements, cat-fights and even knife fights, the bubbling of dislikes and resentments of which the women in question had barely been aware until the unmasking of Khanzada Begum by the foreigner with the yellow hair. p. 204

on love's end...

Love's banal declension through squabbling towards n end. p.280

on parenthood...

The emperor had experienced many feelings concerning this individual:amusement, interest, disappointment, disillusion, surprise, amazement, fascination, irritation, pleasure, perplexity, suspicion, affection, boredom, and increasingly, it was necessary to admit it, fondness and admiration. One day he understood that this was also the way  in which parents responded to their children... p.311

on nationhood and religion...

...because the Raushanai are the chosen people, destined by God to inherit the earth, so if they want to grab their inheritance a little ahead of time, who can say they are not entitled? p.314

Normally he was all languid  grace and fluid gestures. Today, however, he was almost flustered, as if the news he had to impart was bouncing around inside him and knocking him off balance. p.320