17,18/50: Lee, Swarup
Jan. 9th, 2010 08:50 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cyphomandraLast of the books I read for ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
50books_poc in 2009. I started the challenge in April, so I'd definitely like to hit 25 by then. Advance warning that if you liked Slumdog Millionaire (the book - I haven't seen the film) you should probably avoid this review.
Chang Rae-Lee, Native Speaker. Henry Park is a Korean-American employed by a sort of domestic espionage company to provide information on immigrants, neo-Americans; the recently hyphenated. His current assignment is John Kwang, a Korean-American businessman entering politics. His wife – a speech therapist – is somewhere in the Italian islands for an indefinite period, having left Henry a list of the things she thinks he is, her attempt to create a map of him she can follow.
It is beautifully written, it has external and internal plot lines that pull you smoothly through the book, and it is a fascinating examination of all the duplicitous areas of language, culture and identity. Spies, translators, traitors – everywhere where there is overlap, and attempts to understand others, for good or bad reasons. It’s also very much about the American immigrant experience (the other part of the hyphen), and the distances and tensions within this. And, always, about language, and the ideal of the title.
Vikas Swarup, Slumdog millionaire. I almost bailed on this book entirely after the second gay male character as inevitable amoral predator of teenage boys showed up (p59, although our hero also gets forcibly sodomised with a chilli-coated wooden rod by a coincidentally evil policeman on p23). Fortunately, nothing after the chapter with the good straight priest, the evil gay priest, two teenage boys and a not-at-all phallic shotgun is quite as offensive in terms of stereotypes or narrative plausibility, but it’s not that drastic an improvement (and a third amoral predator later tries to rape Salim, Thomas’ friend, but gets interrupted – after that all the forced sex and torture scenes are heterosexual and off-stage).
Ahem. The basic plot has Ram Mohammed Thomas, an Indian orphan, winning a Who Wants To Be a Millionaire game show by flashing back to a series of encounters in his past that provide him with the answers. I think it’s a great concept, still, but of the stories Swarup tells for each answer, the only one I really like is the one where Salim tries to break into the movie industry and ends up living with an assassin. I’m also moderately fond of Thomas with the ageing actress, although his actions in denying the end she wants seem petty, and I do feel he does actually earn his answer when he calls the English teacher whose son he saved by paying for (an entirely fictitious) rabies treatment. The rest of the time, I dislike Thomas and find his narrative voice unconvincing – how, for example, does he know what the dog who bit Shankar looks like, when he never sees it? – and oddly lacking in personality, which is probably why I also like the one told by Salim. I’m also not wild about first person narrators who conceal information from the readers in order to make sudden revelations at the ending, and yet who are apparently intended to be completely reliable at all other times. I ended up feeling not righteously triumphant at Thomas’ victory but annoyed at all the contrivances that had led up to it.
Hmm. On the bright side, Smita, the girl from the chawl who becomes a lawyer, is a perfectly reasonable character, and although she doesn’t really do anything independent of Thomas I did like that they end up in a friendship rather than marriage. And, on the whole, the female characters in this annoyed me a lot less than the male ones. However, I haven’t seen the movie, but I gather it renames Thomas, makes him and Salim brothers, and invents a third female love interest who combines plot lines, losing Smita while, unsurprisingly, keeping the Nita-prostitute storyline.
I ought, perhaps, to have avoided the reader’s club guide at the back, which makes the author come across as irredeemably smug (“By self admission, Vikas Swarup has always been a creative thinker”) and offers a series of unhelpful questions for discussion, including the statement that this book offers “a side of India we don’t often see or read about”. Actually, I thought that the slums were exactly the sort of side of India that external media usually focused on - for me, it was impossible to get a sense from this book of an actual community, as opposed to a dramatic back-drop.
50books_poc in 2009. I started the challenge in April, so I'd definitely like to hit 25 by then. Advance warning that if you liked Slumdog Millionaire (the book - I haven't seen the film) you should probably avoid this review.Chang Rae-Lee, Native Speaker. Henry Park is a Korean-American employed by a sort of domestic espionage company to provide information on immigrants, neo-Americans; the recently hyphenated. His current assignment is John Kwang, a Korean-American businessman entering politics. His wife – a speech therapist – is somewhere in the Italian islands for an indefinite period, having left Henry a list of the things she thinks he is, her attempt to create a map of him she can follow.
It is beautifully written, it has external and internal plot lines that pull you smoothly through the book, and it is a fascinating examination of all the duplicitous areas of language, culture and identity. Spies, translators, traitors – everywhere where there is overlap, and attempts to understand others, for good or bad reasons. It’s also very much about the American immigrant experience (the other part of the hyphen), and the distances and tensions within this. And, always, about language, and the ideal of the title.
Vikas Swarup, Slumdog millionaire. I almost bailed on this book entirely after the second gay male character as inevitable amoral predator of teenage boys showed up (p59, although our hero also gets forcibly sodomised with a chilli-coated wooden rod by a coincidentally evil policeman on p23). Fortunately, nothing after the chapter with the good straight priest, the evil gay priest, two teenage boys and a not-at-all phallic shotgun is quite as offensive in terms of stereotypes or narrative plausibility, but it’s not that drastic an improvement (and a third amoral predator later tries to rape Salim, Thomas’ friend, but gets interrupted – after that all the forced sex and torture scenes are heterosexual and off-stage).
Ahem. The basic plot has Ram Mohammed Thomas, an Indian orphan, winning a Who Wants To Be a Millionaire game show by flashing back to a series of encounters in his past that provide him with the answers. I think it’s a great concept, still, but of the stories Swarup tells for each answer, the only one I really like is the one where Salim tries to break into the movie industry and ends up living with an assassin. I’m also moderately fond of Thomas with the ageing actress, although his actions in denying the end she wants seem petty, and I do feel he does actually earn his answer when he calls the English teacher whose son he saved by paying for (an entirely fictitious) rabies treatment. The rest of the time, I dislike Thomas and find his narrative voice unconvincing – how, for example, does he know what the dog who bit Shankar looks like, when he never sees it? – and oddly lacking in personality, which is probably why I also like the one told by Salim. I’m also not wild about first person narrators who conceal information from the readers in order to make sudden revelations at the ending, and yet who are apparently intended to be completely reliable at all other times. I ended up feeling not righteously triumphant at Thomas’ victory but annoyed at all the contrivances that had led up to it.
Hmm. On the bright side, Smita, the girl from the chawl who becomes a lawyer, is a perfectly reasonable character, and although she doesn’t really do anything independent of Thomas I did like that they end up in a friendship rather than marriage. And, on the whole, the female characters in this annoyed me a lot less than the male ones. However, I haven’t seen the movie, but I gather it renames Thomas, makes him and Salim brothers, and invents a third female love interest who combines plot lines, losing Smita while, unsurprisingly, keeping the Nita-prostitute storyline.
I ought, perhaps, to have avoided the reader’s club guide at the back, which makes the author come across as irredeemably smug (“By self admission, Vikas Swarup has always been a creative thinker”) and offers a series of unhelpful questions for discussion, including the statement that this book offers “a side of India we don’t often see or read about”. Actually, I thought that the slums were exactly the sort of side of India that external media usually focused on - for me, it was impossible to get a sense from this book of an actual community, as opposed to a dramatic back-drop.
