For Ramin Bahrani
When I saw this book and whom it was written by, I was quite excited to read it as I enjoyed his other book, The White Tiger. At the beginning, I wasn’t disappointed – Adiga’s vivid portrayal of characters and setting were great. However, the story then changed and I thought ‘Okay, new characters and story, no problem, perhaps these stories will interlink somehow’. However, I cottoned on that this wasn’t going to happen and that these were short stories. I was disappointed as I don’t like short stories. I haven’t really thought about why I don’t like short stories before and I think it is because I feel as if I get nothing back after investing my time into caring about the characters and the plot. A short story just cuts it… well, short, and it doesn’t satisfy me. I like to immerse myself in a book and be transported to another world for a time. Although short stories can do this to a point, it’s just not long enough for me to spend in that world. However, being the professional that I am, I stoicly read on to the end. Putting my dislike of short stories aside, Adiga pulls it out of the bag. The stories are all set in a coastal town called Kittur, a ficitional place. The beginning of the book has a Contents page which looks like a page from another book. The stories are labelled by either a morning, afternoon or evening and split over 7 days, suggestive of a travel itinerary. Each story begins with a description of a part of a town, again like a travel book. By setting the book in this way, the author makes the reader feel like a tourist which, in some way, you are. The short stories are about the corruption, the injustice and the hypocracy in India. They look at the caste system and the conflict between Hindus and Muslims. They also look at the complacency and the hypocracy of the middle classes. As reader, you ultimately are a tourist, dipping into this world, being shown how terrible it is and then you dip out back to real life.
As with a collection of short stories, some are more poignant than others. The stories are sad and none of them have a happy ending. The collection is vivid and heart-breaking and tries to expose the poverty and hardships in India and how people will tread on one another to survive. However, as I got nearer the end, I became tired of reading the same story repeatedly, which made me wonder if I am heartless or a product of the world we live in? Perhaps Adiga is trying to shake the complacency of my comfortable life and to galvanise me to take action? If this is the case, is he also a hypocrite for making money out of these miseries or a hero for bringing these cases to light? Or maybe, like his characters in the book, we humans are not that black and white.
The Reading Marathon 