But, why did the "White Tiger" deserve the Man Booker?

It has now become my habit to go to the local Goodwill Store during the summer downtime. 

I bought four  LPs and two books for a grand total of $4.72.  Neil Diamond's voice along with a little raspy background noise from the used LP seems to be a lot more exciting and real, compared to the sterile clarity from a CD.

Both the books I picked up are related to India, but in different ways.  Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni's The Unknown Errors Of Our Lives   and Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger. 

As I started reading Divakaruni's collection of short stories, I remembered having read the first one in the book in The Atlantic (or was it the New Yorker?) a few years ago.  I liked that story a lot, but I remembered it all too well to re-read now.  I put away the book, and the rest of the stories will have to wait for another time later this summer.

Over the next couple of nights, I finished Adiga's White Tiger. 

Throughout, and especially after I was done with it, only one question remained: what made White Tiger so exceptional for it to have won the Man Booker Prize?

It is good fiction, and has a lot to offer when it comes to understanding contemporary India, yes.  But, the Man Booker?  Seriously?

I was often reminded of the parallels with Vikram Chandra's Sacred Games that I read a summer or two ago.  Both involve very similar styles of storytelling, and both describe the corrupted morals of everyday lives in India.  While one is focused on Bombay, the other is told by the protagonist based in Bangalore.  Perhaps the biggest difference is simply about the respective sizes--Chandra's yarn stretches way too long at more than 900 pages.

I wonder what I am missing in the White Tiger for me to question its inclusion in the Man Booker category!

Well, at least the LPs--especially the Neil Diamond one--were worth the trip to the store.

The Booker Prize longlist

One surprise: none of the authors' names suggest a South Asian origin, which is a rare occurrence these days in fiction in the English language that qualifies for this prize :) "The judges will now reread the longlist, name a shortlist of six on 7 September and reveal the winner on 12 October."

The Booker longlist in full (click the title to read a review):
Parrot and Olivier in America by Peter Carey (Faber and Faber)
Room by Emma Donoghue (Pan MacMillan - Picador)
The Betrayal by Helen Dunmore (Penguin - Fig Tree)
In a Strange Room by Damon Galgut (Grove Atlantic - Atlantic Books)
The Finkler Question by Howard Jacobson (Bloomsbury)
The Long Song by Andrea Levy (Headline Publishing Group – Headline Review)
C by Tom McCarthy (Random House - Jonathan Cape)
The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell (Hodder & Stoughton - Sceptre)
February by Lisa Moore (Random House - Chatto & Windus)
Skippy Dies by Paul Murray (Penguin - Hamish Hamilton)
Trespass by Rose Tremain (Random House - Chatto & Windus)
The Slap by Christos Tsiolkas (Grove Atlantic - Tuskar Rock)
The Stars in the Bright Sky by Alan Warner (Random House - Jonathan Cape)

More on the Booker Prize winner

The winner is a global citizen ... The Guardian notes that:

Adiga was born in Chennai in 1974 and was raised partly in Australia.
Having studied at Columbia and Oxford universities, he became a journalist, and
has written for Time magazine and many British newspapers. He lives in
Mumbai.

And, hey, I am from Chennai. My brother lives in Australia. A bunch of relatives live in Mumbai. .... We are all global citizens, and the world will be a better place if we adopted that framework.

But then, Rudyard Kipling reminded us that despite all the exposure, we choose to affiliate ourselves with a much smaller part of the world. He wrote:

Each to his choice, and I rejoice
The lot has fallen to me
In a fair ground—in a fair ground—
Yea, Sussex by the sea!

Booker Prize goes to an Indian

In a previous post, I noted the Indian authors in the Booker Prize shortlist. Well, one, Aravind Adiga, is the winner. Interestingly enough, this is his first novel too. The BBC notes that
"Adiga is the third first-time novelist to win the prize. Previous debut winners were Arundhati Roy in 1997 for God of Small Things and DBC Pierre in 2003 for Vernon God Little.
Adiga is a former correspondent for Time magazine and has written for the Independent, and the Sunday Times."

Roy has gone from being a story-teller to an activist/essayist. Let us see what path Adiga takes, given that he is a journalist to begin with.

Booker Prize Shortlist: No Salman Rushdie

The Booker Prize longlist has been narrowed down to six books, whose authors will now compete for the prize that will be announced on October 14th. The shortlist?

• Aravind Adiga The White Tiger
• Sebastian Barry The Secret Scripture
• Amitav Ghosh Sea of Poppies
• Linda Grant The Clothes on Their Backs
• Philip Hensher The Northern Clemency
• Steve Toltz A Fraction of the Whole

The Indian in me notes the presence of Amitav Ghosh and Aravind Adiga. The Guardian reports that

Adiga, who is Times magazine's Asia correspondent, exposes the underbelly of
India's new Tiger economy. The story is told through the letters of Balram who
escapes the poverty of rural India to become a rich businessman in Delhi, but
has committed a murder to reach his place in the "new" India

This reminds me of a big-time businessman in India, Ramnath Goenka. I recall reading an interview with him--perhaps during my high school years. In the interview, Goenka said something like "the spirit was willing, but the flesh was weak" when asked whether he had killed anybody. Now, I am not sure if that interview question, and the answer too, was probing something that was real. Truth can be a lot stranger than fiction.

Booker Prize: Long list announced

The list of thirteen, which will be trimmed down to six on September 9th, has, as The Hindu puts it, "a heavy India-Pakistan flavour". Well, it is not without reasons, as you will see from the titles and authors. The Hindu notes that, Two first-time novelists from the subcontinent — Aravind Adiga, an Indian journalist, and Mohammed Hanif, a London-based Pakistani broadcaster — will compete with Salman Rushdie and Amitav Ghosh for this year’s Man Booker Prize

Not that I have read all the Booker Prize winners over the years. But, really, nothing to beat Rushdie's Midnight's Children for the grand prize? I remember reading Midnight's Children when I was an undergrad, back in India. I liked it a lot. But, I still remember thinking that it could not measure up to Crime and Punishment and David Copperfield, which also I read at about the same time. Of course, these are all different genres, and written in different time periods. But, Midnight's Children did not have that intellectual and emotional depth into understanding humanity that the other two had. After all, isn't literature to help us understand humanity?