Foreign Fiction – Page 7

Man Booker Award 2008

On November 17, 2008

I take care of the foreign fiction section and I had been eying The White Tiger (click here) on the shelf, facing it out for customers thinking that it might prove to be an excellent read. Well, my hunch proved to be a very popular one. Aravind Adiga was awarded the Man Booker on October 14. Now I am midway through the book and have been amazed, saddened and humored as the main character, Balram Halwai, explains through entertaining detail in the confines of a small, dark room to the imagined Chinese Premier his story of rising up from the “Darkness” of India’s caste system.

Also, Nan has decided that The White Tiger will be the January selection for Lemuria’s book club. And for those of you who prefer, The White Tiger is already out in paperback!

At the Man Booker Prize website, there is a great interview with Adiga:

Aravind Adiga talks about the inspiration behind The White Tiger

Congratulations on being longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2008. Has the news sunk in yet?

It’s a great thrill to be longlisted for the Booker. Especially alongside Amitav Ghosh and Salman Rushdie. But I live in Mumbai, where not many people know of the Man Booker Prize; I’m still standing in long queues and standing in over-packed local trains in the morning and worrying about falling ill from unsafe drinking water. Life goes on as before.

This is your first novel but you’re known for your journalism. Has it been a smooth transition to writing literary fiction?

I’ve wanted to be a novelist since I was a boy. I studied English literature – a lot of Elizabethan drama – at university, and wanted to write a novel about India that would be vivid, political, and funny, like The Duchess of Malfi set in Delhi. While I was figuring out how to do this, journalism paid the bills – and also gave me a chance to travel throughout India (and the rest of South Asia). When you work for a mainstream publication, even a very good one like TIME, there is a limit to what you can put into your stories; there is so much you see or observe that goes not into your official reporter’s diary but into another, secret diary-which became The White Tiger.

What inspired you to write The White Tiger?

The novel began as an experiment of a kind. Visitors to India from South Africa or Latin America often asked me why there seemed to be so little crime in India, given the vast (and growing) disparity in wealth between the classes – a condition that had led to much higher levels of crime in their countries. Why was it, I began to wonder, that even though rich people in India keep so many servants, and the servants have such regular and intimate access to their master’s households, that the servants in India, by and large, stay so honest? What keeps the class system in place – and what are the conditions under which it might start to crumble? I began to think of a servant in Delhi who would, cold-bloodedly, steal from his master – and do something even worse to him. And imagining what that servant would think, and feel, and do, I began making notes that turned into this novel.

The White Tiger has been described as a new vision of India with one reviewer calling it ‘a witty parable of India’s changing society’. How do you feel about that?

The White Tiger is not a political or social statement: it’s a novel – meant to provoke and entertain its readers. The narrator is a tainted one – a murderer – and his views are certainly not mine. But there is something I’d like my readers to think about. I’m increasingly convinced that the servant-master system, the bed rock of middle-class Indian life, is coming apart: and its unravelling will lead to greater crime and instability. The novel is a portrait of a society that is on the brink of unrest.

What made you choose to write an epistolary novel? What makes it work as a vehicle for this particular story?

This isn’t an epistolary novel: there are no real letters involved. The narrator is lying in his small room in Bangalore in the middle of the night, talking out aloud about the story of his life. It’s a story he can never tell anyone-because it involves murder-in real life; now he tells it when no one is around. Like all Indians, who are obsessed (a colonial legacy, probably) with the outsider’s gaze, he is stimulated to think about his country and society by the imminent arrival of a foreigner, and an important one. So he talks about himself and his country in the solitude of his room.

http://www.themanbookerprize.com/perspective/articles/1125

This years shortlisted titles are The Secret Scripture by Sebastian Barry, Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh, The Clothes on Their Backs by Linda Grant, The Northern Clemency by Philip Hensher, A Fraction of the Whole by Steven Toltz.

I enjoyed my time at the site . . . you can also find audio and text excerpts from shortlisted titles for the Man Booker along with interviews from other shortlisted authors.

Praise for Gil Adamson’s Debut Novel, The Outlander

By Former Lemurians

On February 28, 2008

In Foreign Fiction

“The Outlander deserves to be read twice, first for the plot and the complex characters which make this a page-turner of the highest order, and then a second time, slowly, to savor the marvel of Gil Adamson’s writing. This novel is a true wonder.” —Ann Patchett

“A remarkable first novel, full of verve, beautifully written, and with all the panache of a great adventure.” –Michael Ondaatje

“Gil Adamson’s The Outlander is, simply enough, a superb novel and one senses in the fine writing the potential or perhaps the eventuality, of a major writer. The frayed material of the North American west is rendered in an astoundingly fresh light. The Outlander is also suspenseful to a degree that you are often in a state of physical unrest, a condition only occasioned by first rate fiction.” –Jim Harrison

“This remarkable novel opens at full gallop and never slows. Adamson has seamlessly merged a compelling narrative with poetic language to create a work that is full of beauty and heart and wonder.” –Ron Rash

“Within the element of nature, comes an independent soul of feminine spirit, mythic in proportion, human in element; a first novel of enduring writing and of the finest pleasure reading.” –John Evans

Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson

By Former Lemurians

On February 25, 2008

In Foreign Fiction

Contrary to the title, Out Stealing Horses is not about rounding up the neighbor’s horses and galloping away. The title refers to holding onto tree limbs and letting go right as horses pass underneath to chance a few moments of sheer joy as two young men, two main characters in this sweep of a beautiful book set in Norway around the post WWII era, share their early youth and are bound through memory for the rest of their lives.

This was chosen by the New York Times as the Best Book of 2007 and rights have sold in 24 countries. The book begins with 67 year old Trond Sander, living alone in a cabin deep in the Norwegian woods where he seeks refuge from the tragic death of his wife. While reading this book, I felt like the novelist Mr. Petterson parted the curtains and took me by his own hand into the snowy fields and innermost heart and mind of Trond. Mr. Petterson gently unfolds layer upon layer of one’s man history, then stitches it back together, bringing us into the present without realizing we ever left it. He does this with such ease and sparse but double rich prose and depth of human understanding that at the end, we are completely satisfied even though we may not know the whole truth about this man and the relationship he had with his beloved father.

In the background are hints of spying for the Resistance during the war, secret excursions into Sweden, death-accidental and otherwise-great love in troubled times. On the surface is a story about 67 year old Trond who discovers a childhood acquaintance also living in the lonely woods far from the comforts of civilization.

I would chose this book as my favorite for 2007 but it also rates up there as one of the best I’ve read as an adult. -Pat

Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones

By Former Lemurians

On July 11, 2007

In Foreign Fiction

When war ravages the native people on a small fictitious tropical island, the even minimal infrastructure collapses, including the small school house, and all the teachers flee. Left to wander about aimlessly, when not running for their lives, the barefoot children flounder under gunfire mixed with boredom. The only white man on the island, labeled “Pop Eye” by the youngsters, but otherwise known as Mr. Watts, initiates a magical mental rescue by the daily out loud reading of Charles Dickens’ well known classic Great Expectations to the small gathering of students. The daily visit into Dickens’ London world of the young boy named Pip, gives the children, and later their parents, who hear second hand about the novel, an escape into a world of literature as their physical world collapses. Told from the point of view of a precocious thirteen-year-old young girl, as she matures, this novel transports the reader not only onto a remote lush island, but also into a world of a beautifully written story. Ironically clever, the author simultaneously lures the reader into this imaginative world as the native people are also being led into the world of Charles Dickens. Beautifully written, amazingly creative, and enticingly spellbinding, Mister Pip gives the lover of powerful, thoughtful literature a reason to fall in love once again with a story within a story.

-Nan

Category: Foreign Fiction (Page 7 of 7)

Man Booker Award 2008

Aravind Adiga talks about the inspiration behind The White Tiger

Praise for Gil Adamson’s Debut Novel, The Outlander

Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson

Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones

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