Between the Assassinations [Englisch] [Taschenbuch]

I'll be the fool that treads where the critic-angels may fear to go: with Aravind Adiga's White Tiger debut, and his Between the Assassinations encore, we are being invited to witness the birth of a literary superstar. My argument is a brief one: White Tiger (which I loved) won the 2008 Man Booker Prize; Between the Assassinations is deeper, richer, even better.

What makes Between the Assassinations superior literature as well as an absorbingly pleasurable (superior and pleasurable are NOT necessarily synonymous!) read? Several qualities, starting with Adiga's ability to describe his homeland of India with the eye of an eagle, and the heart of a lover. In vivid, accessible, witty, fast-moving prose, the author describes life in an Indian city with a vision that is clear, but not jaundiced, realistic but not morose.

Between the Assassinations is a collection of fourteen stories that describe one week in the life of Kittur, a city with enough diversity of culture, language, and religion to give Adiga an ample backdrop for stories about inter-faith tension, caste, corruption, gentility, quiet heroism, lost love, environmental devastation, the struggle (and, at times, the smoldering rage) of the abysmally poor, and spectacular irony. The stories are strung like glittering stones on a necklace: each tale distinct, the strong thread of human life in Kittur connecting all. One story involves a Muslim child, ejected from his rural family to fend for himself during the dry season. On his arrival in Kittur, looking for employment, he states "I'm a Muslim, sir, we don't do hanky-panky." How does this creed play out in the face of sleeping on the street and flirting with outright starvation? The ending surprised me. Another story involves a banker in a charming and childless marriage who repeatedly turns down promotions to Bombay in order to, in part, take pleasure in a secret spot in Kittur's last remaining forest, Bajpe. The protagonist, Giridhar Rao's house is on the edge of Bajpe, and Adiga writes that relatives and residents of the neighborhood "were usually up on their terraces or balconies, enjoying the cool breezes that blew from the forest in the evening. Guests and hosts together watched as herons, eagles, and kingfishers flew in and out of the darkening mass of trees, like ideas circulating around an immense brain. The sun, when it plunged behind the forest, burned orange and ocher through the interstices of the foliage, as if peering out of the trees and the observers had the distinct impression that they were being observed in return." A third story involves a bright, rich, but low caste student at St. Alfonso High School detonating a bomb in class. Struggling with the rough draft of his note to the authorities, he writes "I have burst a bomb to end the five-thousand-year-old caste system that still operates in our country". The effects of the bomb are more comical than lethal (the chemistry teacher, struggling with his congenital inability to use the letter F, shouts red-faced "Puckers! You Puckers"), with the caste system emerging as deadlier than the incident itself.

One challenge issued to Adiga: Your male characters are often exquisitely wrought, your female characters.....are less so.

Is this book for everyone? Nope. It's not India Lite. When Adiga's eye sweeps the physical and human landscape of his country it is as unblinking as a video surveillance camera. The images are as beautiful as nature itself, and occasionally as stark as a bruised child or as revolting as a stream of human waste. India is the world's largest democracy, and an emerging economic superpower, almost reason enough to read these wonderful stories about our half-a-world-away neigbhor. In the end, many readers may be haunted knowing that the relevance of these stories does not know geographical, ethnic, or economic boundaries.

A characteristic I look for in a five star piece of work is the "lingering image test". A week after laying Between the Assassinations down, the herons and eagles of Bajpe mingle in my mind with Kittur's homeless having to pay money to Brother to secure a spot of dirt that they can sleep on at night. Test passed.

I should start by saying that I have not read Adiga's first book, "The White Tiger", so I can't make any comparisons. "Between the Assassinations" is a collection interrelated vignettes with the common element that they are all about people who live in the small town of Kittur. Chapters begin with a brief guidebook-like description of a landmark or area of the town. What follows each of these is a story about the struggles of the people who live there as they deal with issues of religion, caste, poverty and corruption. It's as if the author has said "Now let me tell you the real story behind the pleasant guidebook description."
One story is about a man who owns a shirt factory. He is in despair about the bribes he is required to pay to a multitude of city officials in order to keep the factory open. At the same time he wonders if he should keep it running because the intricate sewing the women do is making them go blind. In this story, one of the characters says, "When it comes to three things - black marketing, counterfeiting and corruption, we are world champions. If they were included in the Olympic Games, India would always win gold, silver and bronze in those three."
While I found most of the stories profoundly sad, I would recommend this book if you want a glimpse of the real India. It is a country of such contradictions -- beauty and ugliness, amazing progress and ancient ingrained prejudices. Adiga has the talent of telling his characters' stories with compassion while never passing judgement on them.

A short collection of somewhat interrelated short stories set in a supposedly fictional city (closely based on Mangalore?) in the Karnataka state of India that never fails to be interesting, but feels as if it falls just short of enlightening.

A few of the short stories stand out as ambiguous and haunting: the story of a young Muslim boy who finds a job watching trains, the story of a privileged young man who toys with a little harmless nihilistic violence, and the story of the lesser half of an extremely small radical Communist party who is forced to confront the end of Communism and by extension what his life has meant. They're the sort of short stories that burrow into your mind and pop unbidden into your mind for years to come. Unfortunately, the same can't be said of all of them.

What's funny is that I can't think of any stories that I disliked. From the little girl, sweetly dedicated to her undeserving father and quite wicked and foul-mouthed to others, to the newspaper reporter who finds quite another world than the one he had been writing about, to the day-laborers who are mercilessly betrayed by fate, the characters do feel realistic and worth knowing. Many of the stories do not depict epiphanies or moments of action, though - quite a few do seem to describe an average day or week in the life of the characters.

I quite liked Adiga's writing, which is unsentimental and very direct, though not simple or minimalist. The closely-observed personal interactions are of particularly high quality. His penchant for black humor and picturesque turns of phrase makes for very entertaining reading in short spurts despite the dark and embittering subject matter. With extended reading, though, the sordidness and negativity tend to pile up and run together, leaving the reader emotionally exhausted and a bit queasy.

One weakness of the book is that the short stories do not seem to tie into one another meaningfully, thematically or in terms of plot. At the end, you do not feel as though a thread of plot has tied all the stories together. There's nothing wrong with that itself, but Adiga starts in that direction early in the book by having important characters reappear between stories. That it is suggested then abandoned feels sloppy. Though the travel guide excerpts (and the way the stories subvert them) help connect the stories, I just thought it could have been a little more cohesive. Perhaps more will fall into place with re-reading.

I'm skeptical that the book conveys the "true" India, or even the "real" Karnataka. From what I hear from Indian friends (mostly from the bordering but very different state of Tamil Nadu), corruption really is as widespread and poverty as much of a scourge as is depicted here. Nevertheless, I don't think that's any more real than the brighter side: of improvements in literacy, education, and the average standard of living through those years.

(It's worth noting that several of my criticisms above are discussed and addressed by the author - not through flashy fourth-wall-breaking, but very naturally in the course of the stories.)

This isn't a sociological text or a political tract, though, but a work of literature. It is interesting, worthwhile reading - not a great book, but truly a good book.