Between the Assassinations

Starred review from April 6, 2009
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.

Spanning a cast of characters that include street urchins and police inspectors, Harsh Nayyar's voice is as flexible as this narrative on modern life in India from the acclaimed winner of the Booker Prize (THE WHITE TIGER, 2008). Nayyar conveys the weariness of the older characters and the exuberance of the younger characters throughout this novel while at the same time reflecting the class, religious, and ethnic diversity of the world's second-most-populated country. Nayyar's slightly accented speech sounds authentically like the English of India. He manages to keep up with the ambitious novel, which shifts continually as the story embraces an extended cast of characters and time frames, including nostalgic glances backward to the era of Gandhi and the Indian independence movement. M.R. (c) AudioFile 2009, Portland, Maine

October 15, 2009
Adiga's (www.aravindadiga.com) second bookfollowing the Man Booker Prize winner "The White Tiger" (2008), also available from Tantor Mediacollects 12 interwoven stories set in Kittur, India, in the years between the 1984 and 1991 assassinations, respectively, of prime ministers Indira Gandhi and her son, Rajiv Gandhi. Adiga paints a striking contrast between the public and private realities of life in Kittur, while actor Harsh Nayyar conveys the appropriate balance of enthusiasm and pathos, his accent lending credibility to the narrative. Those liking fiction exploring social issues and/or stories about India will enjoy. [The Free Pr: S. & S. hc also received a starred review, "LJ" 6/1/09.Ed.]Joanna M. Burkhardt, Univ. of Rhode Island Libs., Providence

Copyright 2009 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.