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Between the Assassinations
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"...more
Hardcover, Large Print, 487 pages
Published
November 2nd 2009
by Thorndike Press
(first published 2008)
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Short stories - really good.
Adiga can make you feel and smell and taste the poverty of India, through description and character, and it ain't pretty. But it's real. Or at least it feels real -- I've never been to India, so what do I know?
Heavy on bodily discharges of all sorts; and eachseenscene (egads!) drips with almost unbearable heat and humidity. The filth is metaphorical too: corruption, physical pain, disease is everywhere; violence looms (although here, unlik...more
Adiga can make you feel and smell and taste the poverty of India, through description and character, and it ain't pretty. But it's real. Or at least it feels real -- I've never been to India, so what do I know?
Heavy on bodily discharges of all sorts; and each
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The title of "Between the Assassinations" refers to the seven-year period between 1984 -- when Indira Gandhi was assassinated -- and 1991 when her son Rajiv was also killed. Set in India, the book captures a cross-spectrum view of life in a town called Kittur, where the characters include a drug addict's chldren who have to beg to keep up their father's habit; a 29 year old furniture delivery man who realizes that this is his life; a servant to a wealthy man who has no control over her...more
I really liked The White Tiger, but I’m a bit disappointed in this, a collection of short stories – written before Adiga won the Booker last year, but not published until afterwards. Publishers sometimes do this with prize-winning authors: they resurrect previously rejected work and rush it out into the bookshops while the author’s high profile guarantees good sales. I have learned the hard way to be suspicious of books published too soon after a big prize by a first-time author. Between the ...more
I really enjoyed this collection of stories set in a fictional southern Indian town, Kittur. The stories are mostly bleak and morose. Adiga's characters face life with the fatalistic belief that nothing will ever change for them. They are stuck in a cycle that they know they will never escape. Some are angry, some are resigned, and some (very few) are hopeful in tone. But the main character, throughout all the stories, is India, in all her guts and glory. While I enjoyed some stories in this col...more
Aravind Adiga’s White Tiger won the Booker Prize and was notable for its intriguing form. I thought it would be a hard act to follow. It would need a great writer to be able to make a repeat match of both originality and style with engaging content. So on beginning Between The Assassinations I was prepared to be disappointed. I need not have worried because Aravind Adiga’s 2010 novel is perhaps a greater success than the earlier prize winner.
The novel does not have a linear plot, nor d...more
The novel does not have a linear plot, nor d...more
Another well written book by Arvind Adiga – a master story teller who does it with such an ease without the need for exclamation marks and long descriptions. His style of storytelling is simple – the way it should be – the way it happened. He takes simple characters from our normal daily lives and tells their stories like they would normally.
A small Indian city of Kittur, and its range of characters, moving from one landmark to another dating between one Gandhi’s assassination to a...more
A small Indian city of Kittur, and its range of characters, moving from one landmark to another dating between one Gandhi’s assassination to a...more
Thank god this is short stories, so I was able to pause between the resounding slap of each delineated life. We know we're privileged, right? Living in India would be pretty bad, "local color" aside, right? If you're white, sitting in an armchair with a computer in front of you, well - you'll never even get close to understanding it. But perhaps you might try, with a book like this.
This book is angry like a furnace about caste, baksheesh, poverty and poshlost. It's set in t...more
This book is angry like a furnace about caste, baksheesh, poverty and poshlost. It's set in t...more
Better than White Tiger. I was born in Calicut, north of which this book is based. Some of the tensions and by plays are very familiar and resonate painfully.
Brilliant book, makes small town Southern India come alive in a fashion that hasn't been seen in 'Indian literature in English' for a long time.
I'm using my words carefully here, there are several brilliant portrayals of Small town India in regional writing in India in several languages - malayalam, tamil, kannada and so on. Se...more
Brilliant book, makes small town Southern India come alive in a fashion that hasn't been seen in 'Indian literature in English' for a long time.
I'm using my words carefully here, there are several brilliant portrayals of Small town India in regional writing in India in several languages - malayalam, tamil, kannada and so on. Se...more
Between the Assassinations is really good. It's quite a bit different from Adiga's earlier work White Tiger. Though portions of the story are told through first person narration, this book deviates significantly from the formula he very successfully used in the past. The characters in this book never meet. Their only connection is the city in which they live. The novel is told through vignettes which reveal the intricate social and political climates operating in the fictionalized city of K...more
After loving White Tiger I was quite excited to read this one but it is a let down on so many levels.
The format is annoying - it is neither a novel nor an anthology of stories -more a collection of episodes related by setting. The writing is inferior to White Tiger and only after reading did I find out that this was a rejected work that went unpublished until his Booker prize win.
Disjointed, episodic tale of an Indian town....some of the episodes are interesting others....more
The format is annoying - it is neither a novel nor an anthology of stories -more a collection of episodes related by setting. The writing is inferior to White Tiger and only after reading did I find out that this was a rejected work that went unpublished until his Booker prize win.
Disjointed, episodic tale of an Indian town....some of the episodes are interesting others....more
The title of this book refers to the years in India that separated the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi on Oct. 31, 1984 and the assassination of her son, Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi on May 21, 1991. Each chapter begins with an entry from a fictional travel guide describing local sights and suggesting an itinerary of attractions, such as the only Hoyka temple in India, the old dysfunctional fort, a locally famous boys' school, the shopping district, and so on. After each day's trav...more
A collection of stories set in a fictional South Indian village between the titular killings of Indira Gandhi and her son. Although Adiga is lauded for his Booker Prize-winning The White Tiger, I found this collection mostly unappealing. It's the old litany of Indian flaws: corrupt, unpleasant characters, everyone looking out on for his own short-term interests, racism, classicism, the stunted sexual development of the repressed society. I know that India has its problems, but story after sto...more
Mostly the reviewers very much liked Aravind Adiga’s first novel ‘the White Tiger’. I was uneasy at its unremitting, unapologetic corruption and violence. Perhaps it was an attention-grabbing ploy, I thought. Well, OK, he got our attention and I for one am bloody glad of it, because ‘Between the Assassinations’ is excellent. The assassinations are those of Indira and Rajiv Ghandi which set the time within which Adiga has created a week in a fictional city by the sea, Kittur, populated by a heter...more
In all the sense a brilliant Indian noir, although it is set in a lesser known town called Kittur at coastal Karnataka. Stark realism and black humour is blended into short stories that are set on the pretext of a fake travelogue of Kittur. It is outrageous, racist, communalist and all that one in a multi-ethinic society would be uncomfortable to talk in public. He narrates each story unapologetically, of the moral bankruptcy of each people who are stuck in the middle of a heavy traffic of caste...more
As I was reading Aravind Adiga's Between the Assassinations I couldn't help but think that if this book had been written in the first person it would be very similar to Sapphire's work. It had that same kind of poverty fatalism. This is a book made up of characters attempting to better their life, their station (their caste, perhaps) and often failing. At the same time, it presents the town of Kittur as a character - the book is written in the style of a guide book - a passive character who quie...more
Halfway between Calicut and Goa lies Kittur, the scene of Aravind Adiga's collection of stories, set in the seven year period between the assassinations of Indira and Rajiv Gandhi. But then, despite some very 80s characteristics, the timeframe hardly matters, this could've been set in contemporary years too, for as a character says "Nothing ever changes. Nothing will ever change." One instant comparison I could make was with Malgudi Days. That however ends with the similarity of multip...more
I understand why Aravind Adiga continues to live in Mumbai; he is sitting on an endless mine of literary material that would keep him writing into a ripe old age. Although never advertized as such, this is a collection of short stories connected only by locale, the city of Kittur, a microcosm of Mother India with it all its fables and foibles.
And so Adiga takes us on a seven-day tour of Kittur, unearthing its myriad denizens and their bizarre situations: from low castes to Brahmins, ...more
And so Adiga takes us on a seven-day tour of Kittur, unearthing its myriad denizens and their bizarre situations: from low castes to Brahmins, ...more
Aravind Adiga gives us another peak into India's harsh and ruthless urban life. Disguised as a travel guide to the fictional southwestern city of Kittur, Between the Assassinations uses the touristic highlights of the city to show us the versatility of an Indian city and its inhabitants. From the Muslim working class to the Hindu Brahmin upper caste, from the homeless untouchables to the catholic schoolboys: they are all trying to make a living through slaving, lying, entrepreneuring, cheating, ...more
"Between the assassinations" is an excellent collection of short stories set in the city of Kittur in India involving the myriad of peoples who inhabit this diverse city. Like in "White Tiger" Adiga is interested in the ways class, religion, caste, and Western culture influence the people living in India. These stories are tragic, touching, and sad, revealing the many hardships of people of all different parts of society. Adiga's writing is fairly straightforward, but the ...more
Set in an imaginary city, Kittur, somewhere on the Indian coast, this book follows several different people through their days, all of this set in the 80s "between the assassinations" of Indira Gandhi in 1984 and Rajiv Gandhi in 1991. Perhaps for readers who are familiar with India in the 20th century, this book is boring or too easy, but for me, who tries to understand life in India from an outsider's point of view, it was very instructive as well as entertaining. Each chapter is prec...more
This is a witty, well-written collection of short stories, by Aravind Adiga, author of the famous White Tiger.
This book in my view is more approachable and as good. Its collection of stories share the same setting and several common themes. It paints life in India from n individual perspective, and gives insight into how people may think. There's a general – false – belief that because people are poorer than us, that they are less intellectually capable; this book goes to show that's quite fa...more
This book in my view is more approachable and as good. Its collection of stories share the same setting and several common themes. It paints life in India from n individual perspective, and gives insight into how people may think. There's a general – false – belief that because people are poorer than us, that they are less intellectually capable; this book goes to show that's quite fa...more
He's an excellent writer, and I appreciate his anger about the the injustice, poverty, and overall misery he exposes in the India of the late 1980s. I wish the publisher had been more honest in the way it portrayed the book on the cover. I thought it was a novel, which it isn-t--instead it's a collection of stories. Normally I don't like short stories and if I knew it ahead of time I might have been less disappointed. I got over my disappointment, however, because of the interesting situations a...more
I am enjoying so far..
When I started this book, I didn't realize that it was actually a collection of short stories, so I was rather disappointed when the end of the first section didn't continue with a chapter following it. I don't mind the idea of short stories, but they have to be good in order for me to like them. I like Adiga's writing style, and I became interested in each of the characters, but at the end of every story, I was wondering what would happen next. I don't think that this is a good way to end ev...more
I felt at the end of the book like this is a guy who had a bunch of short stories written and after winning the Man Booker Prize in 2008, in order to capitalize on that visibility, they could be put together into a book, and voila--Between the Assassinations is born. It is better than that, but only slightly. He is a gifted story teller, but that is not well highlighted in that the stories do not interconnect, there is no tying it up at the end, there is only war[ and no weft to hold it all to...more
A good collection of short stories in the backdrop of a small Indian town, that brings out universal themes of human emotions. Makes one wonder about similar human beings are, even if they are from a radically different social and cultural background. However, I had really high expectations from this book after reading the amazing 'White Tiger', so I felt let down, mainly from unrealistic expectations. This is an insightful collection, but lacks the biting, and at times savage blasts of wit th...more
Podem ler a opinião completa no Floresta de Livros.
I really loved this book from page one. My problem was (and this solemnly my fault) that I misjudged the title (a very misleadign title) and was hoping for a different ending.
I really loved the stories, the people, the town. And the author's prose was sublime. Still, a bit of happiness among all that injustice would've been a relief.
All in all, liked it a lot, but I probably would've loved if the c...more
The author draws characters exquisitely. Set in the city of Kittur, this is a collection of character sketches. Each stands on its own in a chapter, bringing someone to life through a meticulous examination of the interplay between personality, environment, and the rigid if loosening dictates of caste and expectation. While the writing is effective and at times beautiful, there is no plot to tie the character sketches together, just the accident of co-location. The author's work here is admirabl...more
It took me an embarrassingly long time to realize that this book was not a novel, but a book of short stories. Once I did finally figure that out, I could stop searching for non-existent connections between the stories and just enjoy them. Adiga paints a grim picture of a traditional, hidebound India in which one's class/caste/religion paint one into a tiny corner. The tiny, inescapeable corner fills each person with rage and hatred. There is no room left for compassion, even for close relat...more
[Dutch]
Met zijn eerste roman, De witte tijger, won Aravind Adiga in 2008 de Man Booker Prize. Met zijn tweede roman, Tussen de aanslagen, stelt Adiga wederom de verschillen tussen arm en rijk aan de kaak. In een veelkleurig portret geeft hij het leven in het provinciale stadje Kittur weer. Adiga bewijst nogmaals dat hij een scherp oog heeft voor maatschappelijke ongelijkheid, maar de roman laat ook enkele beperkingen zien.
Tussen de aanslagen bestaat uit een aantal korte v...more
Met zijn eerste roman, De witte tijger, won Aravind Adiga in 2008 de Man Booker Prize. Met zijn tweede roman, Tussen de aanslagen, stelt Adiga wederom de verschillen tussen arm en rijk aan de kaak. In een veelkleurig portret geeft hij het leven in het provinciale stadje Kittur weer. Adiga bewijst nogmaals dat hij een scherp oog heeft voor maatschappelijke ongelijkheid, maar de roman laat ook enkele beperkingen zien.
Tussen de aanslagen bestaat uit een aantal korte v...more
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Aravind Adiga was born in 1974 in Madras (now called Chennai), and grew up in Mangalore in the south of India. He was educated at Columbia University in New York and Magdalen College, Oxford. His articles have appeared in publications such as the New Yorker, the Sunday Times, the Financial Times, and the Times of India. His first novel, The White Tiger, won the Man Booker Prize for fiction in 2008...more
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