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I read Aravind Adiga’s Man Booker Prize-winner “The White Tiger” almost a decade ago. Though I don’t much recollect exactly what happens in the story, I remember the feeling it left me with: I was enchanted. Balaram Halwai, the narrator of Adiga’s debut novel, was the kind of anti-hero I always fell for.

I recently watched the film adaptation on Netflix and was reminded of what a wonderful storyteller Adiga is. I hadn’t read any of his other works like “Last Man in Tower” and “Between the Assassinations” which is why I decided to read his most recent book, “Amnesty”. Priyanka Chopra, actor and producer of the movie, The White Tiger, recommended it during Marie Claire’s Shelf Portrait where celebrities talk about books they love.

This much I will say: Adiga is a fine writer. He knows his craft and his stories, I feel, will always incite interesting conversations. Amnesty made me think about my immigrant friends and relatives and how tough things must have been for them when they first moved to various cities abroad. You have to give credit to Adiga for making you reflect on things that you necessarily wouldn’t think about and label other peoples’ problems.

Amnesty is the story of a Sri Lanka immigrant Dhananjaya Rajaratnam, known as Danny, who has overstayed his student visa in Sydney, Australia. As an illegal, he works as a cleaner at rich people’s homes and lives in a grocery storeroom. In four years, he has learnt to hide, to blend in when necessary, and tried to live a ‘normal’ life. Then, Danny finds out that one of his clients, Radha Thomas, has been killed. He is sure the murderer is another client of his who was having an affair with the victim. And thus begins Danny’s moral dilemma: Should he go to the police with the evidence he has and risk being deported? Or should he let it go and carry on with his life?

Amnesty is a story of how cultures and societies, across the world, make immigrants feel like they don’t belong and seeking validation thus becomes a large part of their lives. That ‘important message’ aspect of Amnesty is quite commendable. Adiga manages to convey immigrants’ pain, worries, and issues with crystal clarity. But that’s one part of fiction writing. It’s how well you manage the other feat—narrating the story in a way that reconfigures a reader’s brain wirings—that determines whether a book is good.

The problem with Amnesty isn’t the lack of a plot but that much of it happens inside the protagonist’s head. It’s his thoughts and feelings. It’s his side of the story. It’s only how he interprets the world around him and what’s happening that we get to see. Though the story takes place in the span of a day, you feel like you have been with Danny for years, which, in this case, isn’t really a good thing because Danny is a mundane character.

You are always confused and your thought processes are severely restricted because someone else’s thoughts are being fed to you. You feel like you are being spun around in circles and the effect really is dizzying.

I still wouldn’t say Amnesty is a bad book. I can see why it could appeal to some people, especially to those who have experienced life as an immigrant. But it wasn’t for me and neither is it for those for whom a good narrative structure is as important as the story.

Fiction

Amnesty

Aravind Adiga

Published: 2020

Publisher: Picador India

Language: English

Pages: 256, Hardcover

Celeste Ng’s debut novel ‘Everything I Never Told You’ took her six years to write. She worked on four complete drafts. No wonder it’s as good as it is. Every sentence feels deliberate—conveying so much while saying so little, and the writing is gorgeous. It’s a book you will talk and be nostalgic about long after you have read it. It’s that book you will be shoving under people’s noses saying, “You’re missing out.”

Amazon’s #1 Best Book of 2014, Everything I Never Told You is a story about a Chinese American family living in Ohio in the 1970s, a time when being an immigrant in America came with a whole lot more issues than it does today.

Lydia Lee, a model daughter and ace student, goes missing. Her body is found at the bottom of a lake. The last person to have seen her alive is the local ‘bad boy’, Jack Wolff. Lydia’s elder brother, Nathan, is convinced Jack had something to do with her death. The rest of the family struggles to understand how this could have happened to their sweet and responsible Lydia—the last person you’d expect to get into trouble.

During the police investigation, the family is shocked to find that Lydia wasn’t who she appeared to be. Questions like ‘How was she doing at school?’, ‘Who were her friends?’, ‘Was she depressed?’, ‘Did she ever talk about wanting to hurt herself?’ lead to revelations that complicate the case. The people Lydia claimed to be friends with, she actually hadn’t spoken to for months. She never talked about troubles in school but, in fact, she was almost failing some courses. The family thought she kept journals. Her mother, Marilyn, gave her a new one every year. But she never wrote in any of them. 

It all begs the questions, ‘Who was Lydia?’ and ‘What was she hiding?’. Clearly, the girl her family knew never existed. So, what does that have to do with what happened to her?

As the family grapples with each shocking find, you see how death affects different people, how each person’s way of handling it is unique, and how it tears a family apart and then brings it together. It’s a crime drama where the drama isn’t related to the actual crime but its repercussions on the victim’s family. The book, I feel, brings together the best parts of a thriller and a family drama. These two elements together work brilliantly to keep the story taut and believable at the same time.

Everything I Never Told You feels like a labor of love. Reading it leads to a lot of introspection and a renewed sense of how we must value our loved ones for who they are and not who we want them to be. Ng (pronounced ‘-ing’) has given us a beautiful story of love, loss, and a sense of belonging that will resonate across generations.

Fiction

Everything I Never Told You

Celeste Ng                                                                 

Published: 2014

Publisher: Abacus

Language: English

Pages: 297, Paperback

I am a sucker for fantasy films. Especially the Chinese ones with characters gliding through the air using their kung fu skills. The periodic dramas set in ancient China are themed around kung fu, magic, wizards and demons—with more than a touch of the otherworldly. As someone who grew up watching Hindi-dubbed Chinese kung fu soap operas on Home TV, I’m sure anyone from my generation can relate to this. Chances are that any ardent movie lover will have at least one Chinese fantasy film in their list of favorites, even if it’s only “Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon” (2000).

Released on Netflix this February, “The Yin-Yang Master: Dream of Eternity” is styled in the classic Chinese fantasy film format where the protagonists battle sinister forces with magical abilities of their own. The film is based around the ancient Imperial City of China, in an unknown timeline centuries ago. Directed by Guo Jingming, The Ying-Yang Master is adapted from the novel series Onmyōji written by Baku Yumemakura.

Four demon-fighting master wizards—Hongruo (Jie Dang), Longye (Jessie Li), Bo Ya (Deng Lun), and Qing Ming (Mark Chao)—who come from different parts of the country gather in the Imperial City that houses a malevolent serpent demon. Their predecessors had captured the snake demon and confined it in the City, sealed within the body of a woman and protected by four stone guardians. Despite its confinement, the masters feel the threat of the evil serpent rising again and they want to awaken the four stone guardians to forever imprison the serpent demon within the City.

Staying at the Imperial Palace, the four masters encounter evil spirits as soon as they gather to make plans. At the Palace, the Empress, Princess Zhang Ping (Olivia Wang), and the palace priest, He Shouyue (Wang Duo), greet them with mixed feelings. As it is, there is a sort of rivalry between the masters that is fueled by a mysterious murder within the Palace, with everyone becoming suspects. As the strength of the snake demon and other smaller demons in the City increases, the state of mistrust between the masters themselves, and with the Palace, decreases their combined strength.

The story of The Ying-Yang Master comes with its fair share of twists and turns but from a broad lens, it feels kind of cliched. There are many predictable moments, lessening the story’s impact. But, honestly, who watches these fast-paced, visually delightful movies for their storylines?

In this day and age, watching a movie is not only about acting and directing skills. Visual effects and animation can play a huge part in shaping the audiences’ movie experience. The same is true of The Ying-Yang Master. Although there is no mention of it on its IMDB page, the film feels like it was shot for 3D screens. Right from the beginning sequence where a battle ensues between a demon and a Ying-Yang master, the audience is in for a visual treat.

In a film with as many mystical characters as real ones, fitting them into the same screen without the film looking like an animation is probably the biggest challenge for filmmakers of this genre. The Ying-Yang Master has managed to create a parallel universe of earthly beings fighting the supernatural in a background that is the replica of the real world. There are momentary lapses when the film feels like a video game sequence but, overall, the VFX, SFX and CGI in The Ying-Yang Master are in a class of their own.

Who should watch it?

Even with a run-time of 2hr 12mins, The Ying-Yang Master feels short with so many things happening simultaneously on screen. Meaning, this is a movie that will entertain most audiences. So unless you are only into serious movies with realistic storylines, The Ying-Yang Master is an out-and-out entertainer.

Rating: 3.5 stars

Genre: Fantasy, adventure, action

Cast: Mark Chao, Deng Lun, Wang Ziwen

“The House on Mango Street”, a 1984 novel by Sandra Cisneros, is a short book. It’s written in short bursts, with small chapters, some of which are barely a page long. That is probably what draws me to the book time and again. I know I can finish it in a day and move on. But every time I pick it up, I’m also hoping to get something more out of this little book that’s sold millions of copies, made its way into different prescribed syllabi, and is considered a modern classic. And it doesn’t disappoint. Each reading leaves me feeling a little different from how I did before. 

Partly based on Cisneros’s own experience, The House on Mango Street is the story of Esperanza Cordero, a 12-year-old Chicana girl growing up in the Hispanic quarter of Chicago. The story explores what it’s like belonging to a low economic class family and living in a patriarchal community besides also dealing with elements of class, race, identity, gender, and sexuality.

At the start of the book, you find out Esperanza and her family have arrived on Mango Street. Before coming to Mango Street, they had moved a lot—from one run-down building to another—always promising themselves that they would own the next place and that it would be their ‘dream house’. The house on Mango Street is finally theirs but it’s far from the home they had always dreamt of.

Though the place is a lot better than any of the previous homes they have lived in, Esperanza isn’t happy. She pines for a ‘real’ house with a big garden and everything else she has seen in ‘ideal’ houses on TV. The rest of the story is basically Esperanza’s growing-up years in the house as she writes poetry to express her suppressed feelings, makes friends who aren’t really friends, and tries to craft a better life for herself.

I can understand the universal appeal of this book and why it’s prescribed reading in many countries. A story of a girl transforming through the challenges she faces as she steps into her teenage is motivating. With Esperanza, Cisneros has also delved into the immigrant experience and difficulties that children and young adults face as they struggle to fit in when they find themselves in unfamiliar surroundings. The only problem I have and what’s perhaps a bit jarring for me is the book’s narrative structure. It can get a bit confusing at times and you find yourself rereading certain parts because they have gone over your head. 

But despite its length, A House on Mango Street feels like a full-fledged novel and that’s the beauty of it. You will feel like you have known the titular character for a really long time because, a) there is just so much happening in the story, and b) with her intriguing thoughts and feelings, Esperanza takes up a lot of space in your head and heart. You can also relate a lot with her because some struggles—feeling like you don’t belong, trying to change yourself and your situation—are universal.

Fiction

The House on Mango Street

Sandra Cisneros

Published: 1991

Publisher: Vintage

Language: English

Pages: 110, Paperback