This is the dazzling second book from the winner of the 2008 Man Booker Prize and Nibbies 'Author of the Year' Aravind Adiga: one of the summer's most eagerly anticipated paperbacks and an Atlantic Superlead title. Nestling on India's southern coast lies the town of Kittur. Ranging through the city's streets and schoolyards, bedrooms and businesses, its inner workings and its outer limits, through the myriad and distinctive voices of its inhabitants, Aravind Adiga brings an entire world vividly and unforgettably to life.
Between the Assassinations
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. This short story collection, teeming with life in the small Indian city of Kittur between the assassination of Indira Gandhi in 1984 and that of her son Rajiv in 1991, serves as a prelude to Adiga's Booker Prize–winning The White Tiger. Loosely based on a tourist itinerary, the stories meander through the lives of a motley array of hoykas and Brahmins, Muslims and Christians. We meet Xerox, the peddler of illegally copied books who doesn't mind having been arrested 21 times, as this seems a step up from his father's work as an excrement shoveler. Then there is Jayamma: the eighth of nine daughters, she is sent out to work because her father had only enough money to marry off six daughters. Her only comfort is getting high on DDT fumes and rubbing the buttocks of a tiny idol of baby Krishna. Adiga's India is a place of wildly disparate fortunes, where a 500-rupee meal at the Oberoi Hotel in Bombay scandalizes a construction worker who marvels at the sight of a 20-rupee note. It's a gruesome picture of existence, and the small epiphanies hit like bricks from heaven. (June)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Bookmarks Magazine
Inspired by Balzac's La Comedie Humaine, Adiga intended to write a portrait of Indian life; as such, place and theme, rather than characters, tie together these 14 stories. Each starts with a travel vignette -- a daylong walk around a different section of Kittur -- that introduces the town. But, as he did in The White Tiger, Adiga soon delves deeper to focus on class and caste inequalities and characters "paralyzed by their powerlessness" (Newsweek). His meticulous descriptions of men, women, and children from all walks of life offer insight into modern India, one where few such as these experience redemption. Some reviewers commented on the unevenness of the stories and the lack of overall plot, but all agreed on Adiga's important role as "a sensitive chronicler of modern India" (Telegraph).
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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More About the Author
Aravind Adiga was born in India in 1974 and attended Columbia and Oxford universities. A former correspondent for Time magazine, he has also been published in the Financial Times. He lives in Mumbai, India.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
31 of 33 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Adiga: Eye of an Eagle, Heart of a Lover,
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This review is from: Between the Assassinations (Hardcover)
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
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.
22 of 26 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
The real India behind the guidebooks...,
By
This review is from: Between the Assassinations (Hardcover)
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
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.
12 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Well-observed, but predictable, shallow, complicit short fiction,
By
This review is from: Between the Assassinations (Hardcover)
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
There is enough to recommend this collection of short stories as a pleasant read, written with a nice eye for detail, but this is neither great literature nor profound social thought. Adiga's stories offer us a collection of day-in-the-life looks at different strata, different castes, cultures, religions, and classes of people in the town of "Kittur," in Karnataka. Though the stories are thinly connected by the conceit that all are portions of a tourist guide, which we get a few paragraphs of before each story, the conceit comes off as nothing more than a thin joke and there are no more substantial connections to draw -- so this is really just an anthology of short stories.
The trouble is that these stories are very predictable and very similar, from one to the next: each one hews closely to the formula of classic New Yorker short fiction, in which a small, almost always sad emotional revelation, but little change in the situation, is the payoff of each narrative; they are ultimately rather dull to read as a result of the lack of variety. Further and more troublingly, the large majority of the stories indulge in dubious exoticism (I guess this means the tour-guide conceit is meant as self-parody, but it doesn't seem to signal any deep awareness of the problem) -- and all but one or two of the stories are disturbingly self-congratulatory in aestheticizing the poverty of their subjects. As we read along, the stories allow us simultaneously to furrow our brows at the sadness of rural-Indian poverty and to pat ourselves on the back for recognizing it -- but each story ends predictably in stasis, with each poor character's efforts at economic betterment thwarted, so it seems Adiga expects his readers to congratulate themselves for recognizing that change is futile! "The poor ye shall always have with you" makes for a quietist, profoundly conservative pro-status-quo moral, but that is the moral to each one of these deceptively realistic-seeming, competently observed and crafted fables. And they are ultimately just that, despite the veil of naturalism: conservative fables about the necessity of poverty, written by a former staffer for the Financial Times. Status-quo readers may be pleased with Adiga, but it ultimately reflects very badly on his Western readership that these are the new hot fictions from the subcontinent. I'd suggest that interested readers stick with Arundhati Roy instead, both for better literary craft and for more hopeful, less complicit politics.
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