Amnesty by Aravind Adiga

I am currently reading Aravind Adiga's novel Amnesty.

Here is what the Times had to say about this book:

I like to read Adiga’s novels almost as much as the poet James Dickey liked to drink. He has more to say than most novelists, and about 50 more ways to say it. Born in India, Adiga was educated at Columbia and Oxford. He won the Booker Prize for his novel “The White Tiger” (2008).

Adiga is a startlingly fine observer, and a complicator, in the manner of V.S. Naipaul. Danny wishes to belong in Australia, for example, but his views about other immigrants are tangled. His girlfriend listens to him. “My God!” she thinks. “Danny is a conservative.”

Another illegal immigrant, a lovable and wily young man known as Abe, spies a policeman and recognizes “the look in his eyes: the look of a people losing their grip on a continent.” Adiga is valuable because he attends to how people think, rather than how they should think.

No one in his novels is simple to understand. Adiga may not agree with everything that gets said or thought, but there is no gauze on his mental windshield. Nice people are often skewered, as if on kabobs. Reading him you get a sense of having your finger on the planet’s pulse.

And here is what the Washington Post had to say about the audiobook version of the book:

Aravind Adiga’s fifth novel tells the story of Danny, who was born in Sri Lanka and has spent the past four years in Australia as an undocumented immigrant. Danny works as a house cleaner and sleeps in the storeroom of a bullying shopkeeper. His life is dominated by vigilance over anything in his appearance, behavior or speech that might expose him; accordingly, markers of civil status and background are crucial to the story. Narrator Vikas Adam is pure genius in his delivery of accents and manners of speech of different ethnic and national categories, fully immersing the listener in Danny’s precarious existence. Matters become more fraught as Danny learns that a woman who lives in one of the apartments he cleans has been murdered. She had been generous to him but had involved him in her extramarital affair with an unsavory man named Prakash. Danny has good reason to believe Prakash is the murderer — but turning him in will lead to his own exposure. Brilliantly narrated, this is a powerful depiction of the character, predicament and decisions of a powerless man. (Simon & Schuster Audio, Unabridged, 8½ hours)

I am reading the kindle and audiobook version at the same time. I listen at 2.0x the speed, so the book is a little more than four hours for me. I recommend Amnesty.