A Review of Aravind Adiga's Amnesty

Posted by: jacobballew

This review is covering Aravind Adiga’s Amnesty (Scribner, 2020). I’ve been a fan of Adiga since reading both The White Tiger and Between the Assassinations. Most readers will be familiar with Adiga since The White Tiger won the Booker Prize way back in the day. I still recall how I tried to listen to the audiobook of The White Tiger on a drive down from the Bay Area to Southern California and only seemed to understand about 25% of what I heard. But I digress! Let’s get back to Amnesty: the official page gives us this description: “Danny—formerly Dhananjaya Rajaratnam—is an illegal immigrant in Sydney, Australia, denied refugee status after he fled from Sri Lanka. Working as a cleaner, living out of a grocery storeroom, for three years he’s been trying to create a new identity for himself. And now, with his beloved vegan girlfriend, Sonja, with his hidden accent and highlights in his hair, he is as close as he has ever come to living a normal life. But then one morning, Danny learns a female client of his has been murdered. The deed was done with a knife, at a creek he’d been to with her before; and a jacket was left at the scene, which he believes belongs to another of his clients—a doctor with whom Danny knows the woman was having an affair. Suddenly Danny is confronted with a choice: Come forward with his knowledge about the crime and risk being deported? Or say nothing, and let justice go undone? Over the course of this day, evaluating the weight of his past, his dreams for the future, and the unpredictable, often absurd reality of living invisibly and undocumented, he must wrestle with his conscience and decide if a person without rights still has responsibilities. Propulsive, insightful, and full of Aravind Adiga’s signature wit and magic, Amnesty is both a timeless moral struggle and a universal story with particular urgency today.”

A couple of things to note right off the bat. The novel is certainly at first influenced by the mystery plot, as readers wonder who killed the female client, whose name is Radha. Danny has a good idea about who it actually is, but Adiga takes some time letting us into all that Danny knows and has experienced. As we discover, Radha had been having a tumultuous affair with a man by the name of Prakash.


**Spoiler**

( Read more... )

 

 Another intriguing element to this novel is the form and narrative approach. Adiga employs a kind of stream-of-consciousness style that reminded me somewhat of Woolf’s prose. Perhaps, not coincidentally, Adiga also employs rough time markers throughout the day to give the sense of immediacy to Danny’s day. I have to admit that I found Adiga’s aesthetic approach a bit challenging from the readerly angle. There was a higher level of fragmentation due to the narrative perspective approach that Adiga uses. Nevertheless, the novel makes for an intriguing consideration of diasporic migration as well as the complications of South Asian/Anglophone identity formations.

Buy the Book Here:

https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Amnesty/Aravind-Adiga/9781982127244

comments