Tag: aravind adiga (last 300)
Riotous defense
(HT) Adiga: Tharoor’s soft point is his novels, not his longstanding admiration of Nehru. Has anyone managed to finish ‘Riot?’
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Maximum Impac
(Guardian) ‘The White Tiger’ is the frontrunner for the Impac Dublin award, nominated by librarians and the most valuable one for a single English work. Longlisted: Rushdie, Kureishi, Ghosh, Anuradha Roy, Ruana Rajepakse, Jaspreet Singh. (ht: S)
His final performance
(ToL) Adiga: The sex scenes involving Axler and the ex-lesbian are some of the funniest and dirtiest that Philip Roth has written in a while.
Generation S.A.
(FT) Adiga: Coupland’s Sri Lankan call-centre worker written in earnest, stilted English, a crudely drawn South Asian stereotype. ‘Generation A’ is not one of his better books.
Oh, for a book to ban
(Open) Journie longs for provocative, gonzo novel, not ‘effete’ books by ‘Bengalis and Malayalis living in south Delhi or south Mumbai writing for each other.’ Chandrahas smacks back, see comments.
‘Tiger’ sold 375,000 copies after win
(Bookseller) ‘White Tiger’ is the bestselling recent Booker winner after ‘Life of Pi.’ Plenty of longlisters outsell the winners though.
Zadie Smith praises Kureishi
(Time) Zadie: 2nd genners wanted to get stoned, get laid and be cool, like everyone else. Kureishi was the only one writing about us not as exotica... He was once ejected from mosque... Is writing ‘White Tiger’ screenplay.
Whispered ‘Tiger’
(ToL Jul) Adiga: No one in my complex reads books, except for one fat boy who says ‘White Tiger’ under his breath... Like Dickens, Balzac, Flaubert, arts should slap the middle class in the face... Next book about congestion, property in Bombay today.
Whither the short story collection?
(Nilanjana) Short story writers are pushed into more-saleable novels. Dasgupta created a hybrid form, Adiga’s and Adichie’s stories were delayed until after a novel.
Adiga’s joy in your misery :)
(Dailybeast) Adiga: The main joy of having a book of yours adapted into a movie is the thought that everyone who hated it the first time round will have to endure it one more time.
The black album, the white tiger
The brown tiger
(Irishtimes) Adiga: ‘Are you the person from The Irish Times who was abusing me after the Booker?’ I hurriedly assure him that I am not that person... ‘I’ve failed at just about everything I’ve tried. Which is why I’ve got to be a novelist.’
Stuck in Bombay, trying to write
(NPR) Adiga paraphrasing his uncle: Being a Communist — being an idealist — asks you to see the best in human beings, and being a writer often asks you to see the worst in them.
How English lit shaped Adiga
(Indep) My grandfather’s house was full of dusty books, all in English. This surprised me, because my grandfather, an Indian nationalist, disdained to speak English, except to correct another man’s. [Great essay.]
Adiga more about caricature than subtlety
(CBC) Adiga so distrusts his reader that he jams us repeatedly with the obvious. Nowhere is there an image as resonant as Ellison’s black protagonist sitting in a basement illuminated by ever-burning lightbulbs.
NPR does ‘Assassinations’
(NPR All Things Considered) In ‘Between the Assassinations,’ Adiga reveals great breadth and depth in the hearts of his characters.
Frankensenator
(Twitter) Adiga: i once worked as an intern for al franken, new US senator: and he was NOT a nice man.
Waiting for Godot in India
(Oxonianreview) At times ‘Assassinations’ edges toward epiphany, but the stories begin and end in the same place, circumstantially and psychologically.
The ol’ ballroom dancer gag
(Winnipegfreepress) The women in one story are going blind stitching golden shirts for American ballroom dancers, yet are glad to have a job. Adiga’s slumdogs want what other slumdogs want, and he tells their stories in all their urgency.
Nirpal on ‘Assassinations’
(Thisislondon) Dhaliwal: Adiga makes Indians ordinary, allowing non-Indians a window without obfuscating lyricism. In not talking about the positive in India, he missed an opportunity truly to become a trailblazer.
‘Assassinations’ is convincing
(SF Chron) Adiga achieves in a dozen pages what many novels fail to do in hundreds: convincingly render individual desire, disappointment and survival. It blends pure and profane into a marvelous journey through Kittur.
Adiga in MoJo
(MoJo·L) Adiga: Amitabh Bachchan used to act as coal miners and coolies. Now Hindi cinema focuses on rich characters. The longer I stay in India, the more the marginalized become invisible to me again, as they are to most middle-class Indians.
‘Sunnyside’ reads like dissertation
(FT) Adiga on ‘Sunnyside’: Gold’s prose is decorative and tensile, like art deco steel. A seduction scene is such a gorgeous evocation of movieland glamour, night air and heartache that it calls to mind Fitzgerald’s ‘The Last Tycoon.’
The French and Indian war
(Nationalpost) Adiga: Balzac and Maupassant dealt with industrialization and a new bourgeousie, much like India... S. Indians’ resentment of Hindi is like Catalan speakers’ resentment of Spanish.
The Kittur comedy
(Dailybeast) Inspired by Balzac, Assassinations attempts to catalog the diversity of Mangalore and parts of Delhi. It’s a more personal book than Tiger, and Adiga’s next novel is also set in Kittur.
‘Assassinations’ excerpt
(TO Globe) ‘The Railway Station,’ excerpt from ‘Assassinations’ about a young Muslim gofer tempted by a Pathan stranger.
‘Assassinations’ lacks ‘Tiger’s’ focus
(Time Out) ‘Assassinations’: A litany of oppressor and the oppressed, reported vignettes, a succession of random postcards from the edge.
‘Assassinations’ surpasses ‘Tiger’
(Newsweek) As a portrait of India, Assassinations is richer and more nuanced than Tiger. The fictional town of Kittur is based on Mangalore. ‘The most patriotic thing a creative artist can do is challenge people to see their country as it is.’
Working in the satirical grotesque
(Nationalpost) Adiga’s metaphors are often crude, his characters satirically grotesque. His stories resembles Maupassant’s, but even the best of those stories lack delicacy and subtlety.
Adiga’s 2nd book launched in U.S.
(MoJo·L) Between the Assassinations departs from extreme, cartoonish humor. Here, Adiga displays a quieter style, though his stories have lost none of their teeth.
‘If It Is’: dark
(Mailtoday) Koshy graduated from Occidental, Obama’s alma mater, and worked as a trade union activist. While Adgia’s writing is action-oriented, Koshy delves deep into the heads of the faceless and marginalised.
‘Assassinations’ a mirror to ‘White Tiger’
(TO Star) ‘Assassinations’ and ‘Tiger’ are set on either side of ’91, liberalization... Without Rajiv Gandhi’s death, corrupt, stagnant India couldn’t have been swept away.
‘A continuous growl’
(Bookbrowse) Adiga: There’s a continuous growl beneath middle-class life in India. Balram is what you’d hear if one day the drains and faucets in your house started talking... Most of what’s written about in business magazines is bullshit.
Kindle not the only applet in town
(148apps) ‘White Tiger’ also released as its own iPhone app with search, plus pagination identical to the dead tree version.
A savage, honest ‘Tiger’
(New Yorker) Coll: When we journies went to villages like in ‘The White Tiger,’ we joked that had we been born there, we’d become Naxalites and fight our corrupt landlords. A novel this savage and honest would never be allowed in China.
The accidental book recs
(Dailybeast) Book recs: ‘Between the Assassinations,’ Adiga; ‘The Accidental Billionaires,’ about Facebook, the desi founder and the lawsuit.
Aravind tweets
Hello duo
(Dailybeast) Adiga: Tall and thin, owl-like, knowledgeable about Dostoyevsky and Kokoschka, Ramin Bahrani seemed a creature beamed in from Mars. He had come from a place more alien: North Carolina.
Michael J. Fox, secret desi
(Tampabay) Q: Michael J. Fox, what’s on your nightstand? A: The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga. Also Netherland by Joseph O’Neill.
Adiga won’t write ‘White Tiger’ movie
(ToI) I went to see Revolutionary Road at PVR Juhu. It tackles a difficult novel with some courage... Rajnikanth as Balram Halwai would have made my late mother, who was a big fan of Tamil cinema, very happy.
He’s the king of the world
(Variety) The producer of ‘Revolutionary Road,’ ‘Proof’ and ‘Boys Don’t Cry’ has bought movie rights for Aravind Adiga’s ‘The White Tiger.’ Casting: a brown actor who can play both outwardly servile and ultimately vengeful. Irrfan Khan?
The mile-high book club
(New Yorker) What to read above 15K ft in Nepal? ‘Into Thin Air’ in honor of Everest. ‘The Kite Runner.’ Other trekkers read the literature of their next stops--Naguib Mahfouz for Cairo, Aravind Adiga for India.
‘White Tiger’ unbelievable
(Morningnews) Balram’s letters are so loaded with cutting social observations that he turns into a symbol. He’s a potent stand-in for the hypocrisy of the middle class, but still a symbol. [Same as Rushdie criticism, but I like novels of ideas.] (ht: jabberwock)
Aravind Adiga takes your questions
(TO Globe) Adiga will take readers’ questions from Saturday (Feb. 28) to 5 p.m. on Wednesday (Mar. 4). You can send them via e-mail to webbooks@globeandmail.com or post them as a comment on this story.
Rushide, Lahiri, Adiga on Commonwealth shortlist
(Nationalpost) Commonwealth Prize regional nominees: Rushdie, Lahiri, Aravind Adiga for both books, Mohammed Hanif, Preeta Samarasan, Shashi Deshpande, Pasha Malla, Padma Viswanathan, Nila Gupta, Jaspreet Singh, Murzaban Shroff.
In the year 2009 A.C.
(National) Even after winning last year’s Booker Prize, Adiga’s The White Tiger sold only 100K copies in his homeland. ‘We should divide Indian publishing into pre-and post-Chetan Bhagat.’ Bhagat has kept his day job at Deutsche Bank in Mumbai.
‘The Elephant’
(New Yorker) Adiga: Chenayya got off his cart, looked around till he found a puddle of cow dung on the ground, and scooped up a handful. He flung the shit at the lovers. There was a cry; he rushed up to them, and dabbed the whore’s face with shit.
‘Between the Asssassinations’
(Middlestage) Adiga’s novel too is propelled by anger over power differences and injustice. ‘Whenever a word was said in English, all work stopped: the boy would turn around and repeat the word at the top of his voice — Sunday-Monday, Goodbye, Sexy!’
Penn & Adiga among Salon’s Sexiest
(Salon) Salon’s alternative to People’s Sexiest Men Alive List tags 17 men, including stoner-flick vet Kal Penn and Booker winner Aravind Adiga.
The hypocrisy of hope
(ToL) Adiga: In the latest Bollywood blockbuster, a woman wakes up in a black man’s bed, realises her soul is in danger and runs home to daddy. Meanwhile, Indian newspapers turned Obama’s win into a celebration of Afr-Am history.
Rhys’ pieces
(Guardian) ‘The White Tiger’ was shortlisted for the John Llewellyn Rhys prize for Commonwealth writers under 35. V.S. Naipaul is a past winner. One competitor is ‘God’s Own Country’ by Ross Raisin, not about Kerala but the Yorkshire moors.
‘The Sultan’s Battery’
(Guardian) Short story by Aravind Adiga: The Sultan’s Battery, which appears on the way towards Salt Market Village, is one of the prime tourist attractions of Kittur...
‘Assassinations’ set in coastal south
(IBN) ‘Between the Assassinations’ is about rural, coastal southern India. Adiga’s new agent is David Godwin, who also reps Arundhati Roy and Kiran Desai.
‘White Tiger’ less Orientalist than ‘Inheritance’
(Outlook) ‘The Inheritance of Loss’ propagates the ‘little brown men doing cute little things’ rubbish about Nepalis and Anglo-Indians. ‘The White Tiger’ does not. It got a backhanded reception because it lampoons the middle class.
Adiga’s first manuscript subject of bidding war
(Outlook) Adiga’s unpublished book, ‘Between the Assassinations’ [of Rajiv and Indira Gandhi]: An illiterate Muslim boy is dazzled by a terrorist; a bookseller is arrested for selling a pirated ‘Satanic Verses.’ Out Nov. 1 in India.
Jai and silent UB strike back
Salman spawn
(TO Globe) Generic interview with Adiga but there’s a subtext. (Ms) VK Karthika a Harper Collins appointee published White Tiger in India. First was Sonny Mehta of Knopf. Then we saw the rise of David Davidar at Penguin. The indic writer has spawned many.
Amitava on ‘Tiger, ‘Animal’s,’ ‘Mangoes’
(Bostonreview) Amitava Kumar: I envy Adiga’s claiming authenticity when he is himself in the news: he has access to the real India, he is standing in long lines, he is afraid of drinking dirty water. I could write a novel about this.
‘White Tiger’ reinforces Indian stereotypes
(Aninditaghose) The fact that ‘The White Tiger’ triumphs over ‘Sea of Poppies’ (‘anti-imperial fiction’) speaks for national stereotypes, the politics of award ceremonies and most of all — imperialism. [Disagree.]
The white tiger is a parable
(SM) Adiga never seriously attempts to convince us that his protagonist is a realistic figure. He’s more interested in the generalizations about India his Balram Halwai allows him to make, than in Balram himself.
Adiga on rickshawallas
(Guardian) Adiga: ‘Rickshaw pullers reminded me of black Americans... witty, acerbic and utterly without illusions about their rulers... Fortunately, the political class doesn’t read’... Mumbai landlords won’t rent to singles for fear of terrorism. (ht: Rohan)
Adiga interviewed on BBC
(BBC Video) The Beeb interviews Aravind Adiga, who’s attired in a tuxedo, about his novel. Says it sold well in India. (ht: prakruti)
Sing-song Orientalism
(BBC) Adiga does BBC audio interview. The audiobook is horribly Orientalist, like ’70s Disney doing China. Listen at 1:45. Ugh. (ht: anonandon)
‘White Tiger’s’ singular voice
(Economist) Most books start well, sink halfway through and eventually sound the same. Balram is a witty psychopath. Adiga’s Pip-like hero makes him the Dickens of the call-centre generation.
Adiga new Booker favorite
‘White Tiger’ is too well-written
(Guardian) The writing may seethe with anger, but it is clear and precise. The reminders of his lack of education and supposed naivete draw attention to the sophistication of the writing, which never happened in ‘Animal’s People.’
Against Jhumpa syndrome
(FT) Adiga: There is so much skill in ‘The Boat’ that it takes a second reading to realise just how many of Nam’s characters are caricatures. Memoirists should stick to what they know; the point of literature is to expand the limits of the world.
India needs Medicare
(Citypaper) In ‘The White Tiger,’ Balram watches his overworked father die of tuberculosis in a gov’t hospital without any medical care. Eight months later, he slit his master’s throat.
Adiga takes down ‘India Shining’
(Telegraph) ‘The White Tiger’ is a furious and brutally effective counterblast to smug India Shining rhetoric. Its caricatures are sharply and confidently drawn, and it’s full of barbed wit.
Annals of questionable literary judgment
(Times) Vikas Swarup, an Indian diplomat based in Pretoria wrote ‘Q&A;,’ which is being made into a film. I would even say it’s superior to Aravind Adiga’s ‘The White Tiger.’ [I’m pulling her reviewer’s license :)]
Booker judges made unusual picks
(Guardian) Aravind Adiga’s ‘The White Tiger’ is a brilliantly inventive novel about new India. Michelle de Kretser’s ‘The Lost Dog’ is a difficult, often disturbing work that casts a harsh light on the tensions of present-day Australia.
Adiga: I can live with corruption
(Guardian) In Madras, one party was run by a movie star, the other by his writer. Both took bribes, one delivered... Clean politicians have dishonest sons so they can sit under Gandhi photos... An honest politician has no goodies to pass out to get work done.
Adiga: servants will rise up
(ToL Jun) Poor Indian servants are culturally averse to class warfare, believing huge wealth disparities to be their lot in life. But India will trend towards the class violence of South Africa or Latin America.
It’s all fun and games ‘til someone gets fired
(ToL) When Aravind Adiga was a financial journie intern, his colleague emailed this from his unattended PC: ‘Can anyone tell me who Alan Greenspan is?’ If Sanghera hadn’t scuppered his career, he may not have blossomed into such a promising writer.
‘The White Tiger’ starts with its ending
(BoGlobe) ‘The White Tiger’ is the scary, funny story of one man’s soul. As masters go, his is one of the better ones. But his employer exercises his conscience only when it costs him nothing. The word ‘hypocrisy’ doesn’t seem unsavory enough.
Mystical mischief
(Time) Psychics seem to be taking over NYC. Let them take our deities and incense sticks; we’ll transfer their busts of Galileo to our engineering colleges. Their mystical children will serve our rational children at restaurants in Mumbai.
‘White Tiger’ webcast
(Blogtalkradio) SAJA Webcast with Aravind Adiga, author of ‘The White Tiger,’ beginning now at 5.30 pm ET and archived here afterwards.
D’Souza reviews ‘White Tiger’
(WaPo) Tony D’Souza: Aravind Adiga’s ‘The White Tiger’ blends a Chuck Palahniuk-style confession with a ‘Nanny Diaries’ insider’s look at India’s wealthy. But it doesn’t quite transcend its pop and fluff to achieve deep Orwellian insight.
‘White Tiger’: Tales from the dark side
(Indep) Over 7 nights, from the office of his own startup in Bangalore, sitting beneath an ostentatious chandelier whose light is chopped up by the whirling blades of a small fan and scattered across the room, Balram Halwai tells the story of his life.
India’s Invisible Men
(Indep) Aravind Adiga: Interesting Harlem men turned out Haitian, not American. I left for India, but I’m still surrounded by Invisible Men, pavements clogged with sleeping poor. Invisible Man will speaks with his fists, which will insist: ‘You must see me.’
‘Tiger’ burning bright
(ToL) ‘The White Tiger’ reminds me of Richard Wright’s ‘Native Son.’ ‘The white man has wasted himself through buggery and mobile phones... An egg will crack open, a woman’s hand, dazzling with gold bangles, flings an empty mineral water bottle.’
‘The White Tiger’
(New Yorker) ‘The White Tiger’ by Aravind Adiga: Chauffeur murders his employer, justifying his crime as the act of a ‘social entrepreneur’ in letters to the Premier of China. Argues avaricious elites sacrifice common good. Powerful but not subtle.