The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga

The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


The White Tiger is an exception to my usual readings of post-colonial, anglo-indian writers that I have known and loved. While my big guns (Rushdie, Seth, Ghosh, Chandra etc.) dabble in magical-realism and genealogies, this book wanders towards social realism in a way that can be at times called demagogic. However, the story is riveting, the narrator very interesting and the emotions do, even though at times smacking of much too much sentimentalism, go somewhere real that we all share. The social concerns of the author are revealed openly in passages like the following: "[...] The story of my upbringing is the story of how a half-baked fellow is produced. But pay attention Mr. Premier! Fully formed fellows, after 12 years of school and three years of university, wear nice suits, join companies,and take orders from other men for the rest of their lives.
Entrepreneurs are made from half-baked clay."
Or in another passage, the author's philosophy, albeit "half-baked", comes through:
"Iqbal, that great poet, was right. The moment you recognize what is beautiful in the world, you stop being a slave. [...] If you taught every poor boy how to paint, that would be the end of the rich in India."



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Sense of an Ending

The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Having lost interest in Barnes way when England England was published, I had to read what the old bean wrote to win the man booker. The book starts in a pubescent haze that I enjoyed. After that period it took me a long time to get through the rest as i found it simply boring. A few nice aphorisms of insight do decorate the pages that actually raise the bar of its profundity if anything at all ("history is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation"). However the last few dozen pages hit me like a truck in terms of emotional content. Waves of sadness that is pleasant only when they are artistic flooded over and an age-old metaphysical bellow of humankind tried to rise up my throat. It was not the content in fact I couldn t narrate what happens even to intentionally cause a spoiler to surface. I was reminded of another phrase Barnes had put down in Flaubert's Parrot on the tragedy of man -i believe belongs to Balzac but I' m not sure- which went something like "mankind is like a clumsy bear banging on a broken kettle while actually trying to serenade the stars". Anyway, i don t know if this book is booker prize material but it nonetheless contains some niches of wisdom and sources of contemplation if nothing else that can only come from a seasoned novelist as Barnes.

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The sen