Additional Adiga

Here are a couple of further links (in addition to yesterday's post) that may be useful.

Here is Adiga's Wikipedia page. And here is an interview with him published in Rediff India Abroad, 16 Oct 2008: 'At a time when India is going through great changes and, with China, is likely to inherit the world from the West, it is important that writers like me try to highlight the brutal.injustices of society ... the criticism by writers like Flaubert, Balzac and Dickens of in the 19th century helped England and France become better societies. That's what I'm trying to do -- it's not an attack on the country, it's about the greater process of self-examination.'

Here's a slightly longer interview, at Book Browse.

The influences on The White Tiger are three black American writers of the post-World War II era (in order), Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, and Richard Wright. The odd thing is that I haven't read any of them for years and years -- I read Ellison's Invisible Man in 1995 or 1996, and have never returned to it -- but now that the book is done, I can see how deeply it's indebted to them.

The prominent blogger Amardeep Singh didn't like The White Tiger; read and find out why.

Finally, some context for the 2008 Prize more generally from your course leader. That year I decided (I can't remember why) to read the entire Booker Longlist. I blogged my impressions on The Valve, first on the longlist here; and then when the shortlist was announced I revisited the titles. As you can see from that, I speed-read a library copy of Adiga's novel when I went through the longlist, and couldn't get hold of it again when the shortlist was announced. This has the ironic consequence that I say a great deal about all the novels selected by the Booker judges in 2008 except the one that actually won. (I've since re-read it much more carefully, of course). But there's some stuff there that might be of interest.