what not to read
Ok, so I bought Aravind Adiga’s book The White Tiger because I’m a sucker for the “customers who bought this item also bought…” feature on Amazon. It looked promising: it was a New York Times bestseller, it won the 2008 Man Booker Prize, and there are 8 full pages of praise from reviewers before you even get to the title page. But this book is NOT the ish, and it is definitely no Native Son, like one guy ridiculously claimed. (For a more accurate and balanced opinion, read the NYTimes review here.)
A bunch of reviewers also tried to trick me into thinking that this book was “darkly funny.” It wasn’t.
Instead, I recommend you pick up a copy of Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao,which follows several generations of an unlucky Dominican family and their unfortunate descendent, Oscar, an incredibly nerdy, overweight virgin living in America. This novel is also really grim, but the darkly funny parts are actually darkly funny, and the violent scenes are terrifying. But even the most graphic parts of the novel are often poetic, and Diaz’s style is definitely original. Despite the fact I didn’t understand the Spanish sprinkled in and some of the footnotes were insanely long, and despite the fact that I questioned why almost ALL the female characters needed to have either huge asses, ginormous breasts, or both as a defining feature, this book was one of the best I’ve read recently and I’ll probably re-read it soon.
Filed under: Book Smarts | 1 Comment
Tags: aravind adiga, junot diaz, man booker prize, native son, NYTimes, the brief wonderous life of oscar wao, the white tiger
I didn’t find the book funny. It was painful and morally ambiguous because the hero was damned if he did and doubly damned if he didn’t. His actions could not be morally defended, and he knew it, but felt no real remorse. For my post, see http://silverseason.wordpress.com/.