Quote:
Originally Posted by saliotthomas
Another thing about the book is that it's all based on a letter to the Chinese prime ministere and i still have to figure out that part.It really does not make any sense.
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At the time, I thought I understood it. But them on reading
an interview with Adiga on the Booker site, I was completely baffled:
What made you choose to write an epistolary novel? What makes it work as a vehicle for this particular story?
This isn't an epistolary novel: there are no real letters involved. The narrator is lying in his small room in Bangalore in the middle of the night, talking out aloud about the story of his life. It's a story he can never tell anyone-because it involves murder-in real life; now he tells it when no one is around. Like all Indians, who are obsessed (a colonial legacy, probably) with the outsider's gaze, he is stimulated to think about his country and society by the imminent arrival of a foreigner, and an important one. So he talks about himself and his country in the solitude of his room.
He's talking out loud? If he's talking out loud, what's the deal with the
From The Desk Of and
To sections beginning each
non-espistle?