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Between the Assassinations (Hardcover)

by Aravind Adiga (Author)

4.3 out of 5 stars See all reviews (3 customer reviews)

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Product Details

Hardcover: 352 pages
Publisher: Free Press (Jun 9 2009)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1439152926
ISBN-13: 978-1439152928
Product Dimensions: 21.8 x 15.2 x 3.2 cm
Shipping Weight: 540 g

Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars See all reviews (3 customer reviews)

Amazon.ca Sales Rank: #30,669 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)
Popular in these categories:
#6 in Books > Literature & Fiction > World Literature > Indian
#66 in Books > Literature & Fiction > Short Stories > British

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Product Description

Welcome to Kittur, India. It's on India's southwestern coast, bounded by the Arabian Sea to the west and the Kaliamma River to the south and east. It's blessed with rich soil and scenic beauty, and it's been around for centuries. Of its 193,432 residents, only 89 declare themselves to be without religion or caste. And if the characters in Between the Assassinations are any indication, Kittur is an extraordinary crossroads of the brightest minds and the poorest morals, the up-and-coming and the downtrodden, and the poets and the prophets of an India that modern literature has rarely addressed.

A twelve-year-old boy named Ziauddin, a gofer at a tea shop near the railway station, is enticed into wrongdoing because a fair-skinned stranger treats him with dignity and warmth. George D'Souza, a mosquito-repellent sprayer, elevates himself to gardener and then chauffeur to the lovely, young Mrs. Gomes, and then loses it all when he attempts to be something more. A little girl's first act of love for her father is to beg on the street for money to support his drug habit. A factory owner is forced to choose between buying into underworld economics and blinding his staff or closing up shop. A privileged schoolboy, using his own ties to the Kittur underworld, sets off an explosive in a Jesuit-school classroom in protest against casteism. A childless couple takes refuge in a rapidly diminishing forest on the outskirts of town, feeding a group of "intimates" who visit only to mock them. And the loneliest member of the Marxist-Maoist Party of India falls in love with the one young woman, in the poorest part of town, whom he cannot afford to wed.

Between the Assassinations showcases the most beloved aspects of Adiga's writing to brilliant effect: the class struggle rendered personal; the fury of the underdog and the fire of the iconoclast; and the prodigiously ambitious narrative talent that has earned Adiga acclaim around the world and comparisons to Gogol, Ellison, Kipling, and Palahniuk. In the words of The Guardian (London), "Between the Assassinations shows that Adiga...is one of the most important voices to emerge from India in recent years."

A blinding, brilliant, and brave mosaic of Indian life as it is lived in a place called Kittur, Between the Assassinations, with all the humor, sympathy, and unflinching candor of The White Tiger, enlarges our understanding of the world we live in today.

About the Author

Aravind Adiga was born in India in 1974 and attended Columbia and Oxford universities. A former correspondent for Time magazine, he has also been published in the Financial Times. He lives in Mumbai, India.

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Customer Reviews

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4.3 out of 5 stars (3 customer reviews)

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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Humor Behind the Tragedy of the Caste System, Sep 13 2009

By	Ian Gordon Malcomson (Smithers, Canada) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER) (REAL NAME)

I found Adiga's latest novel on the struggles of modern Indian society to be a stimulating and emotional read, and significantly different from his earlier block-buster and best-seller, "White Tiger". Here, the author offers his reader another way to appreciate the futility of subcontinent India's attempts to become fully democratized. Adiga pulls no punches in taking after India's caste system. It is the time-immemorial way, in which India continues to be stratfied into hundreds of impervious layers of social and economic status, that is the main culprit in India's failure to become a truly liberated country, sixty years after gaining independence. First, there is no focus in this story on one character alone, like in his earlier work but. Instead, it follows the lives of a number of young East Indians - Hindus and Muslims - who haplessly try to survive as social outcasts in a world full of people intent on exploiting and destroying them. Kittur is their secure little home village from which they all choose to move out into a world full of chaos, intolerance and corruption, chasing the illusion of a better life. Second, Adiga does an admirable job in underscoring the hopeless misery of many of the untouchables in modern India. He reserves his greatest scorn for the corrupt and broken-down political and social institutions of a country that has abandoned its dreams of freedom and justice, abandoned its children to poverty and created a false acceptance of poverty as a vow of religious piety. Third, this collection of stories takes a humorous jab or two at how the nation has failed to establish both its dream of nationhood and the authority to go along with it. The book's title refers to a country lost in a historical morass between two tragic moments in modern times: the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, the advocate of a new and more centrally-controlled India that needed to turn its back on the caste system, and her son and successor, Rajiv Gandhi, the dynastic symbol of inherited privilege who failed to follow through on his mother's reforms. Tragically, during this period of anticipated change, India remained, as usual, a nation trapped in its own unwillingness to change its attitude towards the less fortunate - the sick, the uneducated and the poor - in society. The joke that plays out repeatedly in this story is that Indian snobbery amounts to nothing more than a good old case of the pot calling the kettle black, millions of times over. Life in both the city and the local village oozes with hypocrisy as higher caste Indians attempt, in their cruel and insensitive ways - like the old British imperialists of a bygone era - to lord it over their fellow citizens in an effort to stay on top. Yes, Adiga has written another masterpiece, worth reading if only to get you up to speed on how the caste system continues to bedevil India's experiment with democracy. His characters are so well developed that you can't help but feel their anguish, frustration and pathos as their dreams of succeeding are destroyed by prejudice and ignorance.

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3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Dissapointing after reading The White Tiger, Jun 30 2009

By	NorthVan Dave (North Vancouver, British Columbia Canada) - See all my reviews (TOP 100 REVIEWER)

After recommending The White Tiger to pretty much anyone who would listen to me, I was eagerly looking forward to reading Aravind Adiga's latest novel Between the Assassinations. And I'm left, well, a little bewildered.

What made The White Tiger such an awesome novel was the way it told a story. From start to finish Adiga managed to weave a tale that kept making me turn page after page. I never wanted to put the book down. The main character was compelling and I couldn't wait to read the story he was telling about his life.

Unfortunately Adiga doesn't quite achieve the same with his most recent novel. Between the Assassinations is more a collection of short stories than an actual novel. There is an underlying common thread running through each of the stories, namely the struggle between castes and classes/ However as for a regular cast of characters that one would find in a structured story, there is none of that. In fact I had a hard time finishing this book. None of the short stories really spoke to me and at no point was a really concerned with the people in the stories. This is in sharp contrast to The White Tiger, when I really wanted to know how the story ended.

So what's my verdict on this book? Well if you're interested in knowing what life in India is like, then I say read it. But if you're looking for another 'White Tiger' type of novel, then I'd have to say take a pass on this one.

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5.0 out of 5 stars Rich Ironies Abound Concerning Human Nature from an Indian Perspective, Oct 24 2009

By	Professor Donald Mitchell "Jesus Makes Me a P... (Boston) - See all my reviews (#1 REVIEWER)

My heart is in turmoil and cannot rest;
Days of affliction confront me.

-- Job 30:27

Between the Assassinations can seem like an insignificant book about the distressing problems of people in India. One person I offered it to stopped reading after just a few pages. That's an incorrect reading in my view: This is instead a subtle book that has important things to say about the mind-forged manacles that bind us.

At first the points that are made seem to capture situations that are beyond the control of those who are subject to them. We do face situations where there will be no good physical outcome, and that's a valid part of the experience of poor and uneducated people ... especially those who are also discriminated against. Mr. Adiga soon begins to nudge past that point to show that even in bad situations, there are choices: And some choices are better than others. We have the freedom to choose the dignity of the better choices; however, many people brush aside such opportunities and simply do what feels best to them in the moment. Beyond that, Between the Assassinations points out the rather awkward truth that even those with lots of choices will often fail to make those choices, or select awful ones.

Let me share one small anecdote that illustrates poor choices in the story about a Brahmin woman who lives as an unmarried, unpaid servant because her parents could not afford a dowry for her. Resentful at this loss of status, she begins to envy those around her . . . even a Christian neighbor. It suddenly occurs to her that if she does enough sinful things, she may be reincarnated as a Christian . . . and she delights at the thought. Naturally, it never occurs to her to simply become a Christian and change her life circumstances.

Some might complain that the book leaves little room for hope: I didn't read the book that way. Instead, the book portrays people being their own worst enemies (whether they do bad things to themselves or others do bad things to them) in such ironic ways that you can only conclude that a little rationality could quickly replace most of the worst problems, along with a willing heart to look out for others. In that sense, this is a deeply spiritual book suggesting that the problems portrayed are simply ones that can be eliminated by proper living. In one of the final stories, a Brahmin communist (probably a rare combination) shakes off his long-accustomed menial duties to help a widow who has a lovely daughter. With a little knowledge, the widow's financial problems are solved. The communist, however, cannot solve his own problems: Seeking a fantasy of marrying the lovely daughter even though he is man in his mid-fifties and the family is no longer penniless, thanks to him.

As Job suffered long and hard before God restored him to twice what he had before, Mr. Adiga implies that India has great days ahead . . . when it begins to draw on its talented people in a kind and mutually supportive way to share knowledge, resources, favor, and respect. I think he's right.

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