NovelWorld

  The narrator of Aravind Adiga’s hilarious, morally-complicated tale is a self-confessed murderer, and he wants you to like him.

Balram Halwai is a wily kid from a backward village in North India who’s lived a life of brutal poverty and is determined to succeed as a rich man’s driver in the ruthless, crowded chaos of New Delhi. Balram likes to call himself an entrepreneur, which means he’s a hustler, and he hustles for a living, and he’s hustling you, the reader, as he tells his story. You can’t help but laugh as you see through him, but Balram wants you to be on his side, and before long you are. By page 36 of The White Tiger you know that the narrator will slit his master’s throat. The confounding thing is that, the farther you read, the more you discover that the master is the one character who is kind to Balram!

The writing is so natural and laugh-out-loud funny that the book zips along, exhilaratingly satirical with a stinging bite, just pissed-off enough. Though you know the one chilling fact about the ending, you don’t know the when, why, or how. For the last hundred pages I made everyone around me miserable, pacing and gasping, because I couldn’t put it down.

Adiga lets you inside Balram’s mind so that you grow to love him, and when he misbehaves you suffer and worry and sweat. You will never forget the murder scene – and neither will the poor people trapped on the bus with me. It’s one of the best first novels in years, comparable to Mohsin Hamid’s little masterpiece, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, an angry political novel presented as a word-perfect satirical delight, a banquet of moral complexity that will keep you laughing and thinking long after it’s finished.

Animal’s People should have won the Booker Prize.

It towers over the other shortlisted novels, entertainment on a grand scale, hugely ambitious, brilliantly written in slang-laced language that’s a pleasure to savor aloud, and teeming with unforgettable characters. (Can you remember even one character from The Gathering?) There’s Animal himself, a nineteen-year-old with a spinal deformity who runs on all fours and is narrating the story into a tape recorder, Elli, the bold, no-nonsense American woman doctor who has come to open her own free health clinic, Zafar, the beloved leader of the poor who would starve for his cause of justice, Ma Franci, the crazy French nun awaiting the Apocalypse, and Somraj, internationally famous Hindu singer with a damaged throat who now hears music in all the sounds around him. And that’s just a few of them.

The novel takes place nineteen years after a nightmarish industrial gas leak in the American factory that dominates the town. This backstory is clearly inspired by the very real industrial disaster at Bhopal, India, on December 3, 1984 when a Union Carbide pesticide plant had a chemical gas leak resulting in over three thousand deaths, deformed births, contaminated food, and polluted water.

As a stylist author Sinha falls somewhere between Rohinton Mistry and Yann Martel, but his classic passion for social justice links him more with Victor Hugo and Emile Zola, and his host of characters verges on Dickensian in numbers, memorability, and sheer delight. Sinha clearly loves these characters passionately (Take a look at the incredible lifesize statue by Eleanor Stride which the author commissioned of the novel’s central character, Animal) and tortures the reader with worries over their various fates, as a hunger strike in the deadly hot season and a huge protest movement by the poor veer angrily out of control and erupt into city-wide violence.

Here’s a hefty slice of the human comedy, served up with generous portions of every pleasure fiction can offer: language, character, plot, suspense, surprise, and wisdom. Go ahead, start with the first sentence. “I used to be human once.”

Pat Barker’s new novel is the Booker Prize-winning master at her best. Life Class is her tribute to the art world of pre-War London, following the careers of three young art students encountering the horrors of an unimaginable war, and asking – how should art respond to a world erupting into violence and aggression? Turn away and have nothing to do with it? Or plunge into the battlefield and re-create it?

Paul Tarrant is doomed to a life of working in the ironworks, but comes to London on his grandmother’s legacy to pursue his real dream: painting. Kit Neville is the son of a successful war correspondent, and already becoming famous for his aggressive, noisy modern canvases. He’s desperately in love with Elinor Brooke, from the landed world of privilege, who has won a scholarship to the Slade, the legendary art school in London where they all meet. There Paul falls in love with Teresa, an art school model with a violent stalker of a husband. And Elinor begins to fall in love with Paul. Each remains true to their own talent in their own way, as they’re pulled apart and flung together by the war that engulfs them all.

Intermingled with the fictional characters are the real-life womanizing painter Augustus John, the eccentric Lady Ottoline Morrell, the greatest aristocratic hostess of her time, and Dr Henry Tonks, the Victorian surgeon who became an artist and helped pioneer techniques of plastic surgery on the disfigured young soldiers returning from the horrors of the trenches.

In her usual clear, clean, effortless prose, Pat Barker tells a compelling story that never lets up momentum, avoids sentimentality and predictability, and concludes in an extremely satisfying manner, while asking powerful questions about the role of war in art, unanswered questions with plenty of ammo for all sides. She creates characters with passions and values you believe in, talented young people you care about in a world where art and war and love converge.

(originally posted on Shelf-Awareness.com)

The most thoughtful and entertaining novel to come out of Europe in a decade is Night Train to Lisbon, written by Swiss philosopher Peter Bieri under the pseudonym of Pascal Mercier. It’s a smart, heartfelt, thoroughly enjoyable novel written for thinking adults, and the most recent incarnation, from Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf right down to Carlos Ruiz Zafon’s The Shadow of the Wind, of that potent, ever-popular myth, the book that changes your life.

That’s exactly what 57-year-old Raimund Gregorius finds in a secondhand bookshop. That little book, along with a young Portuguese woman about to jump off a bridge, cause this set-in-his-ways professor of dead languages to walk out of the school where he has taught for thirty years, out of his rigid life of habits in Bern, and get on a train to Lisbon to find out everything he can about the little book’s Portuguese author, Amadeu de Prado.

The novel expertly tells two stories at the same time with two very different, very endearing heroes. One is Gregorius, the old academic suffering from dizzy spells, who boldly decides to live the part of his life he’s never dared. From being a stuffy old stickler the faculty call Papyrus, he is slowly humanized and changed in Lisbon by piecing together the troubled saga of the little book’s author.

That's Amadeu de Prado, the other hero, a brilliant bad boy whose fiery graduation address scandalizes the Church, an honest young man who falls in love with the woman adored by his best friend. Amadeu is an obedient son who takes up medicine to please his pain-ridden, hunchbacked father. He becomes a saintly doctor who saves the life of the dictator’s cruelest henchman and becomes hated by the Resistance fighters he loves. Both tales are studded with dozens of great scenes and emotional payoffs.

It’s a story about putting together the pieces of a story. The characters are learned about in their tragic, romantic youth as legendary figures, then actually encountered as old people, when the drama is long over. The present-day action of the novel is built upon geriatric interviews with the survivors. You’ve never read a novel with this many eighty-year-old characters!

To top it off, hefty servings of Amadeu’s translated writings pepper the tale in meaty philosophical chunks. Go ahead and buy this one – believe me, you’ll want to read it more than once.

(originally posted on Shelf-Awareness.com)

This slender little volume of six novellas, five of which are related, is Japanese novelist Tetsuo Miura’s debut in English, and they’re simply astonishing, plain and straightforward in an artless way but packed with unusual twists and turns and told with a quiet urgency.

Both Miura’s unnamed narrator and Miura himself suffer from terror of their own genetic make-up. Miura and his narrator are both writers desperately trying to work out their demons, telling the same story over and over, the story of Miura’s real-life family. One sister threw herself into the sea. One sister took poison. One brother disappeared. One brother ran off with the family funds. And then there’s Miura. With the history of his brothers and sisters, he can only wonder in fear what will he do to shame his family. Does he not have the same blood?

There’s a startling moment when you start the second story and realize you’ve already covered this ground, that the tale of the narrator’s shattered family and his love for Shino is being told again, but differently this time. Each of the five tales takes a different moment in the same narrative. What is told in one sentence in the third story becomes the subject of the fourth story. As exasperated as the reader gets with the narrator, who refuses to work so that he can lock himself in his room and write stories that he can’t sell, the troubled little narratives that have resulted are his redemption and our joy. Slowly you learn more and more about Miura’s brave, tragic family, and the hair’s breadth difference between good luck and bad.

Fascinating minor characters abound – the idealistic bookseller who buys the narrator’s books, the cast-off girlfriend of a college buddy, kind neighbors and childhood friends, broom makers and house maids, the unnoticed, forgettable people of the world.

The last novella has nothing to do with the first five. Maybe this means Miura has worked out his demons, and can go on to tell another story beside his own. Its central image – a father swinging his daughter in a field, and becoming so exuberant he’s careless – captures Miura’s melancholy sense of the randomness of fate. Jaded readers will find that set-ups in Miura’s world seldom lead to the pay-offs we expect. What looks like a “dear John” letter can really be a proposal of marriage.

(originally posted on Shelf-Awareness.com)