Travel Book Review - Numero Dos

The White Tiger - Aravind Adiga

Booker price winner 09. This book is a new release and from a first time novelist, a young Indian guy who lived in US and UK. Overall I have to say this is a great read, fun, easy, insightful and definitely gets you hooked to wanting to know the final plot of the story all the way to the end. I may be a bit bio-st since the story plays mostly in Delhi and all the visual descriptions this guys is putting me through is what I have seen and lived through every day here in town, yet I could have not found the same words ever! Brilliant. I found myself walking the streets of Delhi exactly the way it is. The story is the kind of Slumdog Millionaire type thing but here it isn't pure look and common sense that bring the young boy out from the bottom like in the movie, here it as actual murder, a brought up opportunity that could not be passed up. A very believable story that has you perhaps emphasize with the murderer and not the actual victim for obvious reasons which are introduced fully at the time of it all going down.
A point of criticism - Perhaps it was the editor, but the style of English is a touch too American for my taste. The punch lines and every day dude type sayings are overkill and really bug me. Here I would have much rather heard a British Accent which I thought would have fit better anyways.


A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers - Xiaolu Guo

This is the monthly read for our all women books club. I inhaled it in one go. We are only meeting in two weeks to discuss so maybe I shouldn't say much, but all in all its just a cute read. This is a story of a young Chinese girl going to London for one year to study English at one of the language school. While there she falls in love with an English man and moves in with him. While living with him she describes her every day experience and difficulties of understanding the language, as well as difference in culture. By the end of the year the relationship turns to a somewhat co dependent scenario, leading to a decision point by the time her visa expires. And its not a happy ending either. This book made me think that perhaps I had never loved before. The way she fully gives herself to this man is intriguing to me and something to admire. The writer does a great job sticking to the characters consistently and I am glad there is no happy ending as it would have appeared unreal for the characters to change so drastically that this relationship could have had a chance to survive. Not that it didn't deserve it looking at the connection of both. As the girl in the book is learning English she has to constantly look up words in the dictionary to try to understand, mostly after the conversation was over. The dictionary entries are shared and therefore a true experience is created that for any person who starts to learn a language a diction airy entry with all its different meanings can add more to confusion than clarification. She also compares some times English words with the Chinese dictionary and shares the meaning with us then, which are funny and visual. Virgina for example is called dark tunnel. Cute.

Arundhati Roy - The God of small things
I sat in the internet cafe in Kerala when looking up on the for sale books shelf. Arundhati Roy - this name seemed familiar to me. I had heard it before but the book cover was unfamiliar to me. I always remember books I read by the covers even if I don't recall the title or author. I googled here and found that the book had won the booker price in 97 and from what I could tell was her only novel since. But then I read more about her and found she had since here book fame become a very important political activist, living in Mumbai. And then I was sure I had probably read something from her while at CIIS. She writes articles and a blogg about world politic and economic subjects and has become an important public figure and speaker since. All in all enough reasons for me to buy her book and read it. Turns out the book is partialy autobiographical and Roy grew up in Kerala, hence why the book was promoted everywhere I went thereafter. I even passed the island she lived on and the story is mainly set in while on my backwater tour. Roy took me on an extreme visual tour through what I was seeing right there and then and like with the White Tiger I enjoyed so much getting the story told while being at the actual place in time. In this case we have no happy ending - girl made it out of the slums story - quiet the contrary. Its not a surprise really since the fact of a death of a 9 year old, the girls cousin, is shared in the beginning of the book and the story is leading of to the event of it happening. Actually we also right from the start get how all went down to shits after that death happening and so its clear that the book is going to be quiet depressing. Yet one wants to know how it actually really came to the little cousins death and so you stick with the story. Roy jumps back and forth in time and also between some dreams of some characters. I found this a bit too much to keep track of. In terms of her visual descriptions I thought she went a bit overboard with it. I have noticed this happening some times with first time writers where the description goes like this: The place was like this, and the air smelled of this and the moood was such ans such and the book in hand reminded me of this and this and then she had and accent like someone I knew who looked like this and this - etc. You get the point. Each peace of the sentence/paragraph consists of a visual description and she does it a lot! For a very visual person like myself what happens here is that I am taken from one highly visual place to the next, from the flower the pollen to the smell to the bee and in the end I actually forget what the story behind the sentence or paragraph was saying. I remain in the visual la la land on my own. With some extreme focus I made it to the end of the book which we all knew already ends with the day of the little cousins death.


Next is Hermann Hesse - Steppenwolf