Young Balram Halwai, describing himself as “The White Tiger, A Thinking Man, And an Entrepreneur” in Bangalore, has decided to tell the story of his short life to Premier Wen Jiabao of China, who is about to visit the city. Jiabao, according to the local radio station, is on a mission–“He wants to know the truth about Bangalore,” with its burgeoning population of entrepreneurs. Balram decides that “if anyone knows the truth about Bangalore, it’s me.” In a long letter to Jiabao, written over the course of a week, Balram describes his childhood, his escape from the rural Darkness to the city, his slow journey from poverty into a servitude which pays him enough to survive, and ultimately his successful entrepreneurship in Bangalore. He is a “white tiger, that rarest of animals, the creature that comes along only once in a generation.” He is also a wanted man. A black-humored study of India from the point of view of a “half-baked,” undereducated boy who yearns to be free, Balram’s narrative emphasizes the class divides. Adiga creates a unique look at Indian society, one in which Balram, who grew up in poverty, is exposed to the world of the wealthy, having virtually no contact with the middle-class now burgeoning in India.
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In September, 1957, Joseba, the speaker who opens the novel, and his friend David Imaz are both eight years old when they introduce themselves to the new teacher at their Basque school in Obaba, near Guernica, Spain. David, sometimes called “the accordionist’s son,” is, like his father, an accordionist–an “artist” at his craft–and almost instantly, he finds himself perched on top of a desk, playing for his delighted class. Forty-two years later, the accordion is put away, and Joseba is visiting David’s widow, not in Basque country, but at Stoneham Ranch in Three Rivers, California, where David’s uncle once lived. Joseba, a published author who also participated in the events in Obaba with David, discovers when he reads David’s book that “events and facts have all been crammed” into the book, “like anchovies in a glass jar.” He suggests to Mary Ann that he rewrite the book, expanding David’s memoir and setting the record straight, promising that “any lines I add…must be true to the original.” Mary Ann agrees, and three years later Joseba has completed the book which becomes the text of this novel. (On my Favorites List for 2009)
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Petit’s heart-stopping performance as he walks the tightrope betweent he two World Trade Center towers becomes the pivotal event of this magnificent (and monumental) “New York novel” in which Colum McCann examines many facets of the city’s life in 1974. Focusing first on the down-and-outers—prostitutes, the desperately poor, the drug- and alcohol-addicted homeless, the infirm elderly, gang members, casual thieves, and bright young people with no futures—he recreates the lower depths of New York, a place where its citizens every day walk the fine line between survival and death on a completely different tightrope from that of Philippe Petit. Like Petit, however, all of them are also rejoice in moments of beauty, the only thing that can make their lives worth living—an unexpected kindness, the helpfulness of a friend (who happens to be a monk), and even the bright graffiti that shows up overnight, deep inside the tunnels of the subway. Unfortunately, for some, it also appears at the end of a needle. (My favorite novel of 2009)
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Though Mario Alvarez, in Juan de Recacoechea’s novel American Visa, likes to think of himself as a hero created by one of the great writers of hard-boiled crime stories, he recognizes that, in reality, he is something of a romantic, “a lover of the impossible, a dreamer who never can choose his dream, an incomplete man.” He has come from Oruro to La Paz, Bolivia, to get a tourist visa for the United States, and he has only enough money for a week’s stay at the Hotel California, a seedy hotel in which his room is like “a cell for a Trappist monk.” Learning from an acquaintance that the owner of a travel agency can speed up the visa process for $800, since the agent knows people who work in the visa business, Mario is determined that somehow he will find the money to ensure that he gets his visa. The reader learns Mario’s family history and follows him as he wanders La Paz, a city which has changed dramatically in recent years with the arrival of half a million peasants, many of them Indian. “Local color” in this novel is dark and filled with misery, and as the action evolves and incorporates all levels of society, the sense of dramatic irony increases.
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Basing this fine novel about the settlement of Australia’s New South Wales on the real life and notebooks made by Lt. William Dawes from 1788 – 1790, author Kate Grenville subjects the empire-building attitudes of the Crown and its representatives to careful scrutiny and creates a novel filled with conflicts and well-developed themes. New South Wales was already inhabited by an aboriginal population which had its own language and culture when a thousand British officers and prisoners, both male and female, landed their eleven ships in Sydney Cove and took over land which had been the traditional homelands of the aborigines. Lt. Daniel Rooke, the main character, a stand-in for the real William Dawes, is an astronomer who sets up an observatory on a headland and works alone, soon befriending the aborigines who are so badly mistreated by his compatriots. Firmly grounding her narrative in the human feelings and human costs of all who were involved in this sad chapter of history, she tells an important story which questions the meaning of “justice,” especially when it is applied to alien cultures which see such justice as unadulterated cruelty.
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