Yet another Booker: The White Tiger (Aravind Adiga)

Aravind Adiga is in esteemed company indeed.

After all, he has joined the likes of V.S. Naipaul, Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy, and Kiran Desai, making him the fifth India, after the four mentioned here, to win the prestigious Man Booker Prize for this year.

His debut novel, ‘The White Tiger,’ beat the likes of Amitav Ghosh (Sea of Poppies), Steve Toltz (A Fraction of the whole), Sebastian Barry (The Secret Scripture), Linda Grant (The Clothes on their Backs), and Philip Hensher (The Northern Clemency).

A seasoned writer, Adiga has made his mark in writing as a financial journalist at the Financial Times, writing well-received pieces for Money and the Wal Street Journal; his most recent career association with TIME magazine.

The protagonist in one Balram Halwai. The story outlines his journey from abysmal poverty in Laxmangarh (a fictional village) to huger than huge successful business (in New Delhi). The journey is one which sees him metamorphose into a cynical, sneering, manipulative, one who carries a secret in his dark heart – he has murdered his employer to reach his social standing in ‘new’ India.

The second debut novelist and the second India debut novelist to win the award in its 40 year-old inception, this 33 year old celebrates his birthday this month.

He couldn’t have asked for a better birthday present.

Book Review: Waiting - Ha Jin

Recipient of many literary awards, Jīn Xuěfēi (more commonly known as Ha Jin), literally weaves magic with his pen.

For weeks, silly me had been postponing reading his prize-winning novel, Waiting, (Ha Jin received the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction for it), dismissing it each time as yet another soporific doctor-nurse romance.

I couldn’t have been more wrong.

Saturday night, post some intoxicating liquids, I started turning the pages of the book. And boy! Was I hooked! I was unable to put it down till I finished it – it was that compelling.

Set in Muji City, a fictitious town in China, the novel revolves around an army doctor, Lin Kong, trapped in a loveless marriage to his wife, Shuyu. Love beckons in the form of Manna Wu, an attractive single nurse at his hospital.

It doesn’t help that for the last seventeen years, each time Lin went to his native place, Goose Village, for his annual summer break, he would plead his wife for a divorce, something which the country woman would never grant him.

Communist strictures frown upon Lin Kong and Manna’s union; he needs to be officially separated from his wife before even thinking of a future with Manna.

Despite tending lovingly to Lin’s ailing parents (both of whom die in succession of each other), and bearing a child, Shuyu, the devoted daughter-in-law, wife and mother, is the very epitome of a woman wronged, a woman who was content to be at home, nursing her child(and a broken heart later), although painfully aware that her husband had taken a concubine. Unlike her husband who grimaces at her bound feet, she continues to hobble on them painfully, oblivious to the strange looks and sniggers she draws from other people.

Lin Kong has to wait for eighteen long years to finally secure a separation from Shuyu – after 18 years, a man could divorce his wife whether she gave her permission or not, and is free to marry again.

He does so, and marries the loyal Manna, who has stood by him for almost two decades.

Ironically, he “waited eighteen years just for the sake of waiting.”

I'd leave it at that to fuel your curiosity.

Get hold of this novel to find out what happens to the trio eventually.

A powerful novel, Waiting spellbinds you with its simple writing style, realism, and masterful narration of emotions like love, confusion, anguish, betrayal, lust, and frustration.