The White Tiger

The White Tiger

By Aravind Adiga

Happy Canada Day!

And like any red-blooded Canadian citizen, I like to enjoy our nation's birthday by sitting down and writing a blog post about modern Indian literature. This year I have the pleasure of cracking a Moosehead, turning up Blue Rodeo on the stereo and getting down to business with Aravind Adiga's "blazingly savage" debut (and short-listed for the Man Booker Prize) novel The White Tiger. I put those words, "blazingly savage," in quotations because they are not my words but rather those of Neel Mukherjee, reviewer for the Sunday Telegraph. I'm not familiar with Mr. (Mrs.?) Mukherjee's work for the Telegraph but a simple racial profile (i.e. reading his (her?) name off the byline) indicates that he (she?) probably knows significant amount more than me about India, Indian culture and Indian literature.

That's not to say that I'm writing about this novel in a vacuum. Long-term readers of this blog know that I am an avid fan of Indian literature and read as much of it as I can get my hands on. And I don't know it you have noticed or not but I have been reading quite a few recent Man Booker Prize winners and nominees, recently. It hasn't been a conscious thing, but I have been made aware of my recent trend and it's true (I picked up a recent nominee this morning, so expect more in the near future). So, I'm not entirely devoid of opinion on this novel and I'd like to think that my opinion has some weight on this stiflingly hot Canada Day in Asia.

I bring up Mukherjee's words because I cannot think of a more succinct way in which to express my feelings toward this novel. Set in modern day India, Adiga's novel is told from the perspective of Balram who is introduced as an entrepreneur at the onset of the novel. Narrator via a series of letters from Balram to the premier of China, it is revealed that Balram a small-town indian who has work his way out of The Darkness as a driver for Ashok, a local landowner based in Delhi. As driver, Balram is singly endeared, repressed, ignored and abused by his employer, resulting in a complex relationship that culminates in Balram murdering his boss (note: this is not a spoiler as it is mentioned in the first 20 pages of the book). The result is a "blazingly savage" (see I can't help myself) treatise on the injustice of India's caste, the human quest for freedom and the nature of individualism in a collective culture.

On the surface, The White Tiger is a simple (yet effective) examination of the stifling caste system in India and the way in which it maintains and perpetuates itself. Through Balram we are introduced to the knee-jerk servitude of the lower castes and the way in which lower castes are disregarded entirely. In all the novels I have read about India I have never encountered such a naked appraisal of the injustice of the caste system than in The White Tiger. But nowhere in this novel is the injustice more manifest than Adiga's blistering rant on the nature of Indian democracy and the manner in which the ruling castes manipulate elections to their advantage. Scathing stuff.

But for all the ways in which the caste system hinders social mobility in India, there resides within each individual a burning desire for freedom in some form. In this case, it is Balram's desire for freedom from his master's inconsistent and increasingly erratic relationship. Throughout the novel, despite Balram's questionable behavior, the reader finds it difficult to fault Balram in his often wayward quest to find his way out of the intricate web of relationships and obligations that was woven for him since birth.

Which brings us to the theme of individualism. At a young age, Balram is given the moniker of "The White Tiger" by a local luminary touring the schools in the area. In Indian lore, a white tiger is someone who comes around only once in a generation and is different from everyone around them. Despite the fact that his life trajectory seems to follow the median for his particular caste, Balram maintains the notion that he is somehow different from everyone in his village. Is this a partial motive for his later crime? Perhaps, but more telling of his idea that he is different from everyone around him is that the entire novel is a series of letters from Balram to Wen Jiaobao, Premier of China and the leader of the world's most collective culture. What significance is there in Balram, the stalwart white tiger of individualism, in writing to the very antithesis of individualism? Vanity, perhaps. The same confession written to the office of the President of the United States of America would be received with an anticlimactic shrug. Perhaps Balram has an inherent sense of irony.

It should also be noted that aside from these fun themes, there is an underlying current of globalization gone horribly wrong. In a recent blog post I noted that naive protagonists are often better than those in the know simply because it is more entertaining from a reader's perspective to read  a story told from the perspective of someone who knows precious little about the world around them. Despite his recent success, Balram is the poster child for the half-educated child of globalization. In a sense, technology has permeated our culture (and one would presume Indian culture as well) enough to misinform a significant portion of the population about everything from poetry to physics. We see it in America among the adherents of intelligent design and we see it throughout The White Tiger.

This is the novel that Slumdog Millionaire desperately tried to be and failed. That's not a knock on Slumdog Millionaire so much as it's a heap of respect for Adiga's ability to actualize modern India in a way that is both endearing and horrifying at the same time. This novel is unrelentingly ferocious in its depiction of India and its caste system. The White Tiger deserves all of its accolades. If I had somehow read this novel a few Canada Days ago, before Neel Mukherjee, I would have said that The White Tiger is "blazingly savage."

Read it.

Narcopolis

Narcopolis

By Jeet Thayil

Note: Apologies, this blog post is rushed and poorly written due to the fact that my wife and I have just recently had our first child and things are a little hectic around the house. I hope I can figure out how to maintain the quality of this blog over time without neglecting my duties as a father. Let's see.

It's tough to write a different book about India.

Lots of writers write about India. It's one of those mystical locales that was tailor made for story telling with its bouquet of culture, its irrepressible sights, sounds and smells and its rich history, India has been the setting for dozens of novels that have achieved serious critical acclaim. In fact, since 1997 three Man Booker Prize winning novels have been written by Indian novelists and if you go back through the history of the prize you find that, aside from the Indian winners, many of the winning novels were set in India. 

But something I have noticed over the years is that every modern book I read about India invariably returns to the same themes over and over, most notably the continuous reverberations of colonialism and a level of navel-gazing that rivals Canadian literature. While they are always well written and interesting, I have been waiting to get my hands on something a little different from the sub-continent for some time. Jeet Thayil's novel Narcopolis is just that book.

While Narcopolis didn't win this year's Man Booker Prize, it did make the short list, and thank god for that. Thayil dared to write a novel about India without resorting to the aforementioned safe themes of his contemporaries. Instead, Thayil's narrative is a gritty, no holds barred view into the world of drugs and prostitution in the slums of Bombay. It is a side of India that is rarely mentioned in the English literature from India. While I'm not sure if I'd want to read a glut of books about opium dens in Bombay, I sure would like to read about India from some new angles.

Fittingly, the novel begins with a seven page run-on sentence and doesn't let up from there. I say "fittingly" because what follows is a dream-like narrative that follows the lives of several noted junkies and prostitutes that frequent the opium dens that were popular in Bombay prior to the 1990s. The story begins in a sort of heyday and the slow demise of the den's popularity parallels the decay of the characters.

Written as a series of entwined anecdotes surrounding Dimple, an opium addict and prostitute in Bombay. Dimple was born a boy but was castrated during childhood and lives her life as a woman. Other characters bob in and out of the narrative and each have their own debauched story to tell. The entire book exudes a certain hazy tone and the novel progresses like the literary equivalent of opium smoke languidly wafting through the air. Often many of the stories drift off into nothingness while others that seem like tangents join with the larger narrative structure and continue on from there. Stories braid themselves around each other throughout and Thayil's style has a lazy, unhurried feel as if he is chewing on the sentences one word at a time, thoughtfully relishing each word and placement in relation to the entire work. The language is debased, vile and at time shockingly graphic, but in the hands of Thayil they are impossible to ignore.

Narcopolis is the first of the 2012 Man Booker Prize short-lister that I have read. For the language alone it is worth the read. Given that it did not win, I am excited to see what may have been deemed better than this carefully crafted work. Furthermore, it's really nice to see some more unorthodox Indian literature getting recognition. Perhaps this means we can expect a run of post-post-colonial literature out of India over the next few years.

One can hope.

Cutting For Stone

Cutting For Stone

By Abraham Verghese

I have a Doogie Howser reading complex as of late. According to the books I read, teenage surgeons are far more common than I have been lead to believe. First there was Homer Wells in The Cider House Rules and now Marion and Shiva Praise in Abraham Verghese's opus Cutting For Stone. Who would have thought that performing life and death procedures could be so flippantly possible for those suffering from low self-esteem and acne.

But I digress.

Cutting For Stone is an epic story of two generations of expatriate doctors living and working at a mission hospital in Addis Ababa in Ethiopia. The novel is actually quite sweeping and provides a wonderful insight into life during the last years of Selassie's reign and the tumultuous years of Mengistu's dictatorship (not to mention the uncertainty of the Eritrean and Tigre independence movements occuring in the background). Verghese is an adept novelist who knows exactly where, when and how much information to divulge to the reader throughout but is also careful to remind readers along the way about key ingredients that cannot be forgotten along the way. I enjoyed the way he constructed such flawed, fragile characters and his ability to describe specific forms of surgery is borderline grotesque. Verghese reminded so much of Salman Rushdie at times that I had to check the cover to make sure I hadn't picked up The Moor's Last Sigh by mistake.

Cutting For Stone, like so many novels I have read this year, really concerns itself with time and love, our lack of time and the way we as humans fritter it away on things we assume are meaningful, much to the detriment of love. This notion is best represented in the relationships between the narrator, Marion Stone, his (formerly conjoined) twin brother Shiva and their childhood friend Genet. One uses time, another abuses it the third lives as if it doesn't exist at all. This, as one can imagine, complicates their relationships immensely as they grow up and enter the world for adults. This was the central precept of the entire novel for me. As a complete piece of work, Cutting For Stone is quite a rewarding read...

That is, if you can get that far.

Aha!

Considering the plaudits this book has received since its publication in 2009, I might be sticking my neck out by saying this. The problem with this novel, for me, lies in it's first third. It's a minor problem in the grander scheme of the entire book, but it was something that bothered me the entire length of the read. I spent a week reading this book and almost half that time trying to slog my way through the first 150 pages. I hardly ever put a book down, but Cutting For Stone really tested my mettle. I can't recall a novel that eased into the story more slowly.

Verghese sets a pastoral, provincial tone for life in Haile Selassie-era Ethiopia and much of the first third is comprised of plot structures in need of construct for their inevitable culmination. I understand setting up your pins, but things need to keep moving. Furthermore, Verghese spends this portion of the novel delivering a Ondaatje-esque, dream-like narrative of life before the birth of the main character, Marion. All of this together makes for some pretty foggy reading.

There is a (non-spoiler) scene around the 150 page mark that speaks volumes about the pace of this book. Ghosh, one of the resident doctors at the mission (called Missing) hospital is asked to perform voluvus (a blockage in the bowel) surgery on a controvertial army colonel. The surgery is ultimately successful, Ghosh saves the colonel's life and the colonel is able to pass stool once again. I found this bit to be an interesting piece of art-imitates-my-reading.

Perhaps it was my own state of mind during the first few days of reading but it seemed to me that the novel itself had been suffering from a blocked narrative and this little piece of fictionalized surgery removed the blockage and allowed for the story to finally progress unobstructed without asides, tangents or fuzzy pre-birth assumptions. It was only after this scene that I was able to settle into the book and truly enjoy it.

Minor thing, I know and certainly not the sort of thing that should dissuade you from reading this novel, especially if you are interested in Africa, medicine or complicated familial relationships. Ultimately, this book is well worth the effort. Abraham Verghese is a stunningly adept writer of prose and a vibrant new face in the literary world. I'll be on the lookout for his other work in the near future.