The White Tiger: A Novel Review

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The White Tiger: A Novel ReviewIn his debut novel, Aravind Adiga takes on some hefty issues: the unhappy division of social classes into haves and have-nots, the cultural imperialism of the First World, the powder-kegged anger that seethes among the world's dispossessed, and entrapment. But his skills as an author protect the novel from becoming one of those horrible didactic stories in which characters and plot are little more than mouthpieces and vehicle for delivering Great Truths. The White Tiger entertains and gives pause for thought. This is a good combination.
The plot centers around Balram Halwai, a laborer born and raised in a small village utterly controlled by crooked and feudally powerful landlords. The village is located in 'the Darkness,' a particularly backward region of India. Balram is eventually taken to Delhi as a driver for one of the landlord's westernized sons, Ashok. It's in Delhi that Balram comes to the realization that there's a new caste system at work in both India and the world, and it has only two groups: those who are eaten, and those who eat, prey and predators. Balram decides he wants to be an eater, someone with a big belly, and the novel tracks the way in which this ambition plays out.
A key metaphor in the novel is the rooster coop. Balram recognizes that those who are eaten are trapped inside a small and closed cage--the rooster coop--that limits their opportunities. Even worse, they begin to internalize the limitations and indignities of the coop, so that after awhile they're unable to imagine they deserve any other world than the cramped one in which they exist. Balram's dream is to break free of his coop, to shed his feathers and become what for him is a symbol of individualism, power, and freedom: a white tiger. But as he discovers, white tigers have their own cages, too.
Of course, it's not simply the Balram's of the world caught in the rooster coop. Adiga's point seems to be that even the world's most privileged suffer from a cultural and class myopia that limits perspective and distorts self-understanding. The White Tiger is a good tonic with which to clear one's vision and spread one's wings.
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No Country for Old Men Review

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No Country for Old Men ReviewCormac McCarthy's first novel since completing the Border Trilogy in 1998 is a dramatic change of pace. Gone is the focus on the wild Texas plains and the encroachment of civilization. Gone are the lyrical descriptions of untamed nature and young love. Gone is the belief that love and hope have a fighting chance in life's mythic struggles. Instead, we have a much darker, more pessimistic vision, set in Texas in the 1980s, a microcosm in which drugs and violence have so changed "civilization" that the local sheriff believes "we're looking at something we really aint even seen before."
Forty-five-year-old Sheriff Ed Tom Bell must deal with the growing amorality affecting his small border town as a result of the drug trade. The old "rules" do not apply, and Bell faces a wave of violence involving at least ten murders. Running parallel with Bell's investigation of these murders is the story of Llewelyn Moss, a resident of Bell's town, who, while hunting in the countryside, has uncovered a bloody massacre and a truck containing a huge shipment of heroin. He has also discovered and stolen a case containing two million dollars of drug money, which results in his frantic run from hired hitmen. Hunting Moss is Anton Chigurh, a sociopathic cartel avenger, a Satan who will stop at nothing, the antithesis of the thoughtful and kindly Bell. A rival hitman named Wells is, in turn, stalking Chigurh.
By far McCarthy's most exciting and suspenseful novel in recent years, the story speeds along, the body count rising in shocking scenes of depravity. Bell's first person musings about crime, society, and the people around him break the tension periodically, allowing the reader to ponder the wider implications of the action and to see it as a symbolic struggle for man's soul between good and evil, love and hate, God and Satan. As the violence continues and Bell becomes more discouraged, he visits his elderly Uncle Ellis, a former deputy sheriff and war veteran, and as they talk about World War I and the Vietnam War, where they were willing to give their lives for a presumably winnable cause, the contrast between those battles and this battle on the home front is seen in broader and bleaker perspective.
McCarthy's desire to preserve traditional values, and his grim vision of the present and future, reflect a view of life that many readers will not share. The artistry the reader has seen in McCarthy's thematic development throughout the rest of the novel is sacrificed in the last forty pages, in which Bell's overt warnings and cautionary remarks about the future sound preachy. Still, the novel is breathtaking in its construction, and Sheriff Ed Tom Bell is one of McCarthy's best-drawn characters. (4.5 stars) n Mary Whipple
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Misterioso: A Crime Novel Review

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Misterioso: A Crime Novel ReviewThe first couple of pages of this book had me wondering what I had gotten into. It just seemed a bit jerky and clunky. Luckily, I persevered with the book and somewhere around page 40ish the book became difficult to put down.
While the story is similar to countless other serial killer novels it is the writing that makes this book rise above the rest. Unlike so many detective novels dealing with serial killers, this book doesn't focus on endless, gruesome details of torture and gore. The killer's exploits aren't recounted in nauseating and tedious detail. The author instead focuses on character development and describing the background that shaped the world-view of the serial killer.
The story takes place in 1990s Sweden in an atmosphere of racial tension and national self-loathing over the greedy banking fiasco of the 1980s (a period of self-introspection our own nation seems to have skipped) Dahl's protagonist, Paul Hjelm, is simultaneously undergoing his own period of self-introspection as career and family issues collide to make him question himself-- to make him look into himself and confront "the abyss."
I won't bother to describe the entire story in this review, what I would like to say is that Dahl's Hjelm is a lot of fun to read. He reminds me a bit of Martin Cruz-Smith's Arkady Renko, but without that character's martyr complex and self-destructive streak. Hjelm is human without being boring and cool without being a cartoon character.
I think the best part of this book is the complex view it gave me of Sweden, a country I know practically nothing about. Until reading this book I only though of blond, beautiful, happy Swedes, helping each other and being good citizens (okay, a I knew about a bit of angst a la Bergman, of course).
I whole-heartedly recommend this book to readers who eschew the Patricia Cornwall and James Patterson formulas and enjoy something edgier, along the lines of Ken Bruen, Peter Hoeg, and Cruz-Smith.Misterioso: A Crime Novel Overview

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