With a breezy, irreverent point of view and a fine eye for the kinds of details which make characters and scenes memorable, Aravind Adiga tells an often humorous morality tale about life in an area of Mumbai undergoing residential redevelopment. And just as his Booker Prize winning novel, The White Tiger, was celebrated because “it shocked and entertained in equal measure,” this novel, too, both shocks and entertains. Here Adiga also explores the theme of moral compromise, which India seems to require of its citizens if they are to become financially “successful.” The extreme poverty and the masses of other enterprising residents with whom everyone except the very rich must compete make absolute morality impossible, Adiga seems to suggest, a luxury which few can afford, and Adiga draws from these conflicts in his novels. The fifteen apartments of Vishram Society Tower A in Vakola, “the toenail of Santa Cruz,” near Mumbai’s airport, are home to a group of relatively middle-class residents – a social worker, a hardware specialist, a retired accountant, a teacher, and a journalist, for example. When Darmen Shah, who works for the Confidence Group, makes an offer to buy out the residents to build a super-luxury apartment building, most of them are ecstatic. He is offering a windfall of the equivalent of $330,000 per apartment if they will vacate so he can tear down their building and build his new development. The only catch is that all of the residents must agree to sell.
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On the opening page of this emotionally overwhelming novel, Lilly Bere, age eighty-nine, begins the grand story of her seemingly insignificant life, a story in which she speaks directly from her heart, begging to know “How can I get along without Bill?” her grandson who has just died following the First Gulf War in Kuwait (1990 – 1991). Each of the next sixteen chapters is one more numbered day “without Bill,” and we soon learn through flashbacks that Lilly and her family have suffered deaths connected to three earlier wars – the Great War (1914 – 1918), the Irish War for Independence (1919 – 1921), and Vietnam (ca.1965 – 1975). Though all the men she loved did not necessarily die in combat, their deaths were all inescapably war related, and Lilly becomes, in many ways, the prototypically devastated wife of Tadg Bere (in the Irish Revolution), sister of Willie Dunne (the Great War recruit featured in The Secret Scripture), mother of Ed (in Vietnam), and grandmother of Bill (in Kuwait), a mourner who is equally a victim of the wars that have taken her men. One of the best novels I have read all year.
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Drive, though the most brutal film I have ever seen, is nevertheless very worth seeing for those with the fortitude to deal with the darkness and graphic cruelty. Nicolas Refn, a Dane who won the Cannes Film Festival Award as Best Director for this film, creates a tight and spine-tingling drama of a character known only as Driver (Ryan Gosling), a young man who works as a Hollywood stunt driver by day and as the driver of getaway cars at night. A man who is emotionally scarred from some unspecified trauma in the past, Driver (Ryan Gosling) is cold, unflappable, and just what a career criminal wants in his getaway driver. Opening with a robbery scene followed by a high octane chase scene, as Driver and two robbers avoid the police and two helicopters, the film then shows Driver returning to his almost bare apartment and meeting pretty Irene (Carey Mulligan) in the hallway. A strange love story runs parallel with dramatic scenes, chases, shootings, and all kinds of mayhem, but as the film develops, the viewer comes to see that Driver has his own bizarre sense of ethics, and a real desire to help Benicio, Irene’s young son. Drive is a dark and violent but complex literary novel. As a film, it is also violent but far more earthbound and simplistic, with no real subtlety except in Gosling’s acting.
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As a long-time fan of author James Sallis, I am excited to see how this novel “plays,” now that it has just been released as a film, a first for Sallis. A novelist who writes some of the most compressed novels ever, with big stories conveyed in a few perfect word choices, absolutely right images, and terse but revelatory dialogue, Sallis says more in one sentence than most other authors say in a page or two. His novels are the darkest of the dark, and the lives of his damaged characters are often the messiest of the messy, but his style is powerful and exhilarating despite the misery. In Drive, a quintessentially minimalist novel, a main character known only as “Driver” works as a stunt man by day and as the driver of getaway cars at night. Purely pragmatic and living only in the moment, he has no real dreams and no long-term goals, the result of his violent childhood, which was not a childhood at all. Opening dramatically with Driver leaning against a wall in a Motel 6 room, his arm wounded so badly it is useless, with three dead bodies around him, the novel repeats these images like a bizarre refrain throughout, as the background for this scene and the action which follows are revealed. In terse prose, as efficient in conveying information as Driver is in killing those who threaten him, Sallis follows Driver as he moves between Los Angeles and Phoenix, doing jobs.
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Winner of an extraordinary number of literary prizes in Tasmania, Australia, and England, including the London Observer’s Book of the Year Award, WANTING by Tasmanian author Richard Flanagan emphasizes, by its ambiguous title, two of the most contradictory characteristics of Queen Victoria’s reign—the “wanting,” or desire, to conquer other lands and bring “civilization” to them, and the “want,” or lack, of empathy and respect for the people and cultures which they deliberately destroy in the process. The same contradictory characteristics are also reflected in the personal relationships of the socially prominent men and women of the era, some of whom we meet here. As the action moves back and forth between Van Dieman’s Land (now Tasmania) and London and from 1839 through the 1840s and 1850s, Flanagan gives depth to the bleak picture of colonial life, creating an emotionally wrenching portrait of Mathinna, orphaned child of aborigine King Romeo, as she is wrested from her countrymen, exiled on Flinders Island, and brought into the home of the ambitious Lady Jane Franklin. Determined to prove that this savage can be civilized, Lady Jane forces the child to imitate a proper British young lady in her education, dress, and demeanor, allowing her no connections to her past but providing nothing of value in its place. Outstanding and memorable novel.
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