22. Trust Exercise – Susan Choi
I’m not sure what to make of this one really. The book starts in the 1980s, with the story of a group of teenagers and their charismatic and slightly sinister teacher at a school for the performing arts in an anonymous American city. The narrative then shifts forward twenty or so years; the teenagers from the first section are now adults and we see the impact of their “unconventional” schooling. The book concludes in the present, where the narrator seeks to tie up all the loose ends. Whether you think she succeeds depends on how much you understood events up to this point!
Multiple unreliable narrators, switches in tense and unexpected time shifts made this rather a stodgy read. It’s certainly very clever, in a play within a book within a book kind of way, but I’m not sure that I enjoyed it. If this book were a person it would a really clever, verbose person with a huge vocabulary who you admire but don’t really want to be friends with, if you see what I mean.
I found it difficult to connect with the characters, possibly because they were almost without exception completely lacking any redeeming features, perhaps because the self-consciously clever structure of the book made even the emotive subject matter of the me too movement feel remote and abstract , probably a combination of both. Although this won the 2019 National Book Award in the USA, it wasn’t a major hit with me.
23. Amnesty – Aravind Adiga
My first by this writer, this was an interesting and quick read. The book describes one frenetic day in the life of Danny, a Sri Lankan over-stayer in Sydney. Danny works cash in hand as a cleaner a group of middle class Australians he describes as “thin bums” who for example, who eat salad and go jogging, but don’t have time to clean their own homes. “Thin bums” as opposed to the “thick bums”, the cash poor, obese Australians who have to clean their own homes.
When one of Danny’s clients is murdered, he is faced with a terrible choice. Should be contact the police to tell them what he knows about her death, risking deportation, or should he continue to lie low?
I really enjoyed the vivid descriptions of Sydney, which had a larger than life cartoonish quality which kept me turning the pages. The writer makes many acute observations on life as an undocumented immigrant or “illegal” as he describes it. The style of the book is witty and decidedly tongue in cheek, with much to say about the often exploitative relationships between established, “legal” migrants and the hypocrisy of a system which demonises the immigrant while relying on him to supply cheap labour to prop up the economy. Thought provoking.