Review: Last Man in Tower

review

Last Man in Tower
Aravind Adiga
HarperCollins
Rs. 699
Pp 432
ISBN: 9789350290842
Hardcover

About the book
Ask any Bombaywallah about Tower A of the Vishram Co-operative Housing Society and you will be told that it is unimpeachably pucca. Despiteits location close to the airport and bordered by slums, it has been pucca for some fifty years. But then Bombay has changed in half a century not least its name – and the world in which Tower A was first built is giving way to a new city, a Mumbai of new development and new money; of wealthy Indians returning with fortunes made abroad.

When real estate developer Dharmen Shah offers to buy out the residents of Vishram Society, planning to use the site to build a luxury apartment complex, his offer is more than generous. Yet not everyone wants to leave; many of them have lived in Vishram for years, many of them are no longer young. But none can benefit from the offer unless all agree to sell. As tensions rise, one by one those who oppose the offer give in to the pressure of the majority, until only one man stands in the way of Shah’s luxury high-rise: Masterji, a retired schoolteacher, once the most respected man in the building. Shah is a dangerous man to refuse, but as the demolition deadline looms, Masterji’s neighbours – friends who have become enemies, acquaintances turned co-conspirators – may stop at nothing to score their payday. A suspense-filled story of money and power, luxury and deprivation; a rich tapestry peopled by unforgettable characters, not least of which is Bombay itself, Last Man in Tower opens up the hearts and minds of the inhabitants of a great city – ordinary people pushed to their limits in a place that knows none.

Reviews:
Full review here Guardian
If the residents of Tower A, Vishram Society, pride themselves on anything, it is their respectability – their "pucca" way of life in their "unimpeachably pucca" apartment building. Once pink, Tower A may now be a "rainwater-stained, fungus-licked grey"; it may not boast an uninterrupted supply of running water; it may sit amid the slums of Vakola, in the flight path of Mumbai's domestic airport; and it may be falling into a state of disrepair unchecked by its ineffectual secretary. But Vishram Society's virtues outweigh its failings; a model of neighbourliness and middle-class virtue, it brings together those of different backgrounds – originally built for a Catholic population, it admitted Hindus in the 1960s and "the better kind of Muslim" in the 80s – in harmonious testimony to the possibility of cooperative living. That, at least, is the theory, although Aravind Adiga's painful tragicomedy demolishes it more quickly than Dharmen Shah, his ruthless property developer, throws up his luxury redevelopments.

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Full review here Telegraph
In his first, Man Booker-winning novel, The White Tiger, Aravind Adiga captured the contradictions of the new India; in this, his third book, he goes further: they are quite literally the building blocks of his plot.

Last Man in Tower tells the story of a struggle for a slice of shining Mumbai real estate, bringing all of Adiga’s gifts for sharp social observation and mordant wit to the fore.
The “last man” of the title is Yogesh Murthy, or “Masterji” as he is affectionately known, a retired schoolteacher who gives top-up science classes in his spare time. He lives in a crumbling but “absolutely, unimpeachably pucca” middle-class block of flats in the Vishram Housing Society. The water only works for a couple of hours twice a day and each monsoon threatens to bring the roof in; but this is still an idyll representing what was once, itself, “new India”. Citizens of every religion rub along together in a way, Adiga writes, that would have made Nehru proud.

-o-o-o-Full review here Hindustan Times
There comes a point in Suketu Mehta’s Maximum City, a chronicle of his love-hate relationship with Bombay, where he takes Paul Theroux’s ‘Bombay-smells-of-money’ argument up by a notch to conclude, “Bombay is a city in which everything is on broad, public display. Nothing is hidden.” This simplistic observation stands apart from the rest of the book, which repeatedly asserts that you cannot describe Bombay in black and white, for beneath the surface of this seemingly monochromatic megalopolis lies a vibrant spectrum of greys.

This is where Aravind Adiga enters with his third book (and second novel) Last Man In Tower. If people, not steel and glass, impart Mehta’s florid and fragile Bombay its character, Adiga’s admiration for Mumbai forms the foundation of his latest novel.

“I was born in India, raised here and I love it here,” says Adiga. But that love didn’t go unopposed. In 2008, Adiga faced the ire of self-styled nationalists who read too much into the journalist-turned-author’s debut novel The White Tiger (which went on to win the Man Booker Prize), and involuntarily transformed him into a critic of India’s social and economic dichotomies. The story of the clash of an advancing India with its primitive self, where the eponymous character-narrator Balram Halwai’s “schematic and limited” vision of life was mistaken to be that of Adiga’s, exposed to the world a nation caught with its pants down, ‘loyalists’ felt.


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Full review here Financial Times
Land, today, has become the most valuable resource in India, lying at the dark confluence of politics, money, business and pure human avarice. With the economy growing at breakneck pace, the pressure for the acquisition and development of land has never been greater. Nowhere is this more obvious than in Mumbai, India’s commercial capital. As rents and property prices have skyrocketed, so has grown the public outcry against the city’s rapacious redevelopment. A veteran journalist lamented recently that every government in the region “has been the government of the builders, by the builders and for the builders”.

Aravind Adiga’s latest novel Last Man in Tower examines this sharpening crisis from the perspective of the residents of an old apartment block in north-west Mumbai. Vishram Society “is anchored like a dreadnought of middle-class respectability” in a neighbourhood populated by slums. Despite its peeling paint and 47-year-old brickwork, the grandmotherly building is spoken of with reverence because its residents “pay taxes, support charities, and vote in local and general elections”.

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Full review here DNA

Last Man In Tower is set in Tower A of the Vishram Co-operative Housing society in Vakola, Mumbai. It is an aging, run-down apartment building inhabited by a disappearing breed, the middle class. The occupants of Tower A are a closely knit bunch, having supported each other through many crises, trials and tragedies. Yet, when a builder approaches the society with a lucrative offer, friendships that have spanned decades start to fall apart.

The novel takes for inspiration a phenomenon that has swept every Indian metro in recent years: middle class families wooed by sky-rocketing property prices sell their modest homes and move into penthouses, swapping their scooters for cars, Godrej almaris for imported teak cupboards, thrifty habits for a lifestyle of affluence. In Adiga’s Last Man In Tower, a retired sixty-one year old science teacher, ‘Masterji’, is the last man to resist the builder’s offer.

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Full review here GQ India

When Aravind Adiga’s debut novel The White Tiger swept to victory in the Man Booker Prize, instead of throwing bouquets, Indian critics threw brickbats. A barrage of epithets, rather unfairly, rained in: stereotypical, dull, demeaning and tedious.

The writer’s third novel, Last Man in Tower, might not change their minds entirely. A taut, visceral tale based in Mumbai, this literary pot-boiler probes urban redevelopment, a festering sore in a city where land is scarce and invaluable. Adiga’s minutely detailed and almost voyeuristic insights into the lives of the dwellers of a cosmopolitan housing society are bigger than the plot, though.

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Full review here Washington Post 

Funny, provocative and decadent: Aravind Adiga’s “Last Man in Tower” is the kind of novel that’s so richly insightful about business and character that it’s hard to know where to begin singing its praises.

That Adiga knows economics well should come as no surprise. After all, he worked as a financial journalist for Time magazine in India, and his first novel, “The White Tiger,” reveled in the darker consequences of a world turned flat. The story described a servant seduced by visions of wealth who murders his way out of poverty. It was as popular as it was controversial in India, and in Britain it captured the Man Booker Prize.

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Full review here Seattle Times

Aravind Adiga, winner of the Man Booker Prize for "The White Tiger," brings readers another look at an India at once simple and complex, as old as time and brand new.

The Mumbai residents of Tower A, Vishram Society, get along very well; Catholic, Muslim and Hindu sharing what was once a thoroughly first-class building. Their home is now short on light and running water, long on flaking, rainwater-stained walls and in need of the periodic services of the seven-kinds-of-vermin man.

Despite these shortcomings, Vishram dwellers are content, until they meet Dharmen Shah, an eminently successful and ruthless developer and his "left-hand man," the enforcer, Shanmugham.

Shah, who is not a well man, wants to ensure his legacy by building "The Shanghai," a modern high-rise, on the site of Tower A. He offers each tenant more money than any of them could amass in a lifetime, just to relocate. This offer is met with great rejoicing all around, except by one person: Yogesh A. Murthy, known as "Masterji," age 61, a retired schoolteacher and a recent widower.


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Full review here Independent

In Mumbai, property development is a serious business. Sometimes deadly serious.

Prime land is costly; human life is cheap. The Vishram Society is a middle-class housing co-operative based in a block to the city's east. The area has become intensely desirable, and property developer Dharmen Shah is determined to tear Vishram down and replace it with luxury apartments. Yet not all Vishram's residents are willing to be bought out, despite Shah's generous offers. Opposition centres around Yogesh Murthy, nicknamed "Masterji", an obdurate retired teacher and widower.

Aravind Adiga is most famous, of course, for his Booker prize-winning novel The White Tiger. It told the story of a downtrodden servant who was willing to go to shocking extremes to get the better of his masters. Subtle it wasn't, but the savage energy of its satire could not be ignored. Adiga's next volume, Between the Assassinations, was a collection of stories set in a fictitious southern Indian town, also focussing on poverty and corruption. In it, Adiga's facility with language came further to the fore in a series of evocative cameos that captured the town's stagnation.

The booking window

Screen adaptations of books usually need to add lashings of spicing to the plainness of the printed page

Aravind Adiga’s hugely enjoyable novel Last Man in Tower (if the adjective enjoyable can be used to describe an account of one man’s lone battle against rapacious neighbours and a powerful builder) is crying out loud to be made into a movie.

Screen adaptations of books usually need to add lashings of spicing to the plainness of the printed page; Adiga already has flavour by the ladlefuls. He portrays the city as a breathing, hissing sentient being, and his richly atmospheric descriptions of the housing society that former schoolteacher Murthy seeks to prevent from redevelopment, as well as Mumbai itself, are purely cinematic.

Last Man in Tower is supposed to be a contemporary tale but the story and characters are reminiscent of parallel films from the 1980s. Was Adiga among the thousands of Indians who plopped down before Doordarshan on Sundays at 1pm in the old days to watch socially conscious regional language cinema? The book harks back to films like Tabarana Kathe, in which Charu Hasan wages a Camus-worthy battle against governmental bureaucracy for his pension. Or Veedu, starring Archana as a middle-class woman trying to buy a house. Or even the films of Saeed Mirza that depicted the travails of the working class in Mumbai. Most of all, the novel reminded me of Mahesh Bhatt’s Saaransh, one of the director’s finest movies. Anupam Kher’s schoolteacher Pradhan, who is mourning the death of his son, finds a reason to live when his tenant, who is pregnant by the son of a Bal Thackeray-like politician, wants to keep her baby. Adiga’s Masterji too is haunted by the past like Pradhan, and perhaps Kher, who started his acting career with Saaransh, could be recruited to play yet another schoolteacher fighting the good fight in another time.

Full report here Mint 

Midnight’s other children

In the spring of 1997, the literary quarterly Granta published an issue devoted to India’s Golden Jubilee. The tone was cautious but celebratory: on the cover, the country’s name was printed in bright red letters, followed by an exclamation point. Fifty years after partition, an independent India was rapidly establishing itself as an international power. The issue, which consisted largely of contributions from native Indians writing in English, was a testament both to the country’s extraordinary intellectual and artistic richness, and to one of the few legacies of British colonialism that could be unequivocally celebrated by readers in South Asia and the West: a common language. Seventeen years after Salman Rushdie’s shot across the bow with Midnight’s Children, a new generation of Indian writers was, in Granta’s words, “matching India’s new vibrancy with their own.”

In the ensuing years, the American appetite for Indian culture has only grown. Many of the writers who arrived on the scene in the 1980s and ’90s — Vikram Seth, Arundhati Roy (whose wildly successful novel The God of Small Things was first serialized in Granta), Amit Chaudhuri — continued to publish fiction and reportage, and a new wave of novelists, including Kiran Desai and Aravind Adiga, went on to write prize-winning, best-selling books. Readers of Roy, Desai or Adiga — not to mention the viewers who flocked to “Slumdog Millionaire” — have not been spared portraits of Indian life’s miseries (caste-based discrimination, horrific poverty). But the folkloric and redemptive aspects of the stories, already familiar thanks to Rushdie’s magic realism and the more romantic understandings of Hinduism associated with the Kama Sutra, have merely solidified Westerners’ rosy vision of India. These books and films have also complemented the work of writers like Jhumpa Lahiri, who was born in London and raised in Rhode Island and has written vividly about Indian-Americans. The Indian experience, however foreign, has become part of the American experience.

Full report here NYT

White Tiger now in Gujarati

Noted psychologist and counsellor Dr Prashant Bhimani's Gujarati version of the novel 'The White Tiger', originally written by Aravinda Adiga, was released at Crossword book store in Ahmedabad on Sunday, Sep 19.

"This is the first time I have written a book and the person responsible for sowing the seeds of writing in me is Kajal Oza," said the author-cum-psychologist.

The book in its new form was released by Kajal Oza Vaidya and Siddharth Randeria. As many as 150 people were present to witness the book launch, which was followed by book reading by Randeria.

"This book has beautiful descriptions of India, our culture, our beliefs, entrepreneurship etc. The book clearly describes how we Indians are like roosters in coops, trapped in our old beliefs and customs. Just like roosters in cages, don't try or struggle to come out, similarly we Indians haven't yet tried to come out of our old beliefs," said Bhimani.

Full report here DNA

Hinduism and modernity

The contemporary Indian novel might be said to have two strains. The first is the Indian novel in English, and its best-known representatives are household names: Salman Rushdie, Vikram Seth, Amitav Ghosh, Vikram Chandra, Kiran Desai and Aravind Adiga. The second is the Indian novel in languages other than English, and who the great names are in this space depends very much on the language and geographical location of the reader. The English-speaking reader, relying solely on translations and looking down again from a pan-Indian perspective, might say that currently these are the Bengali novelists Sankar and Mahasweta Devi, the Tamil writer Salma, the Hindi writer Alka Saraogi, the Oriya writer Chandrasekhar Rath, and the Rajasthani folklorist Vijay Dan Detha.

One remarkable aspect of the Indian novel is that both these strains trace their origins in the work of one man, Bankimchandra Chatterji (1838-1894). The first Indian to take a BA under the new English-medium educational system set up by the British, Chatterji thereby came under the influence of the novel, then a prose form unknown in India. Chatterji’s first novel, Rajmohan’s Wife (1865), written while he was a young deputy magistrate in the newly established Indian civil service, was composed in English.

Full report here Mint

A new bend in the river

Having moved beyond postcolonialism and a welter of sari-and-mango novels, Indian literature has struck out into darker, messier terrain, Rana Dasgupta writes. Is this the new lore of an agonised nation? 

Novels and nations are linked by an intimate kind of analogy. If nations are the stage on which modern life and feeling unfold, novels are the form in which these things are recounted, understood and turned, finally, into lore. Such is the apparent scale and ambition of modern life that no smaller treatment than the novel will finally match up – not even cinema, which, for all its protean vitality, has never quite displaced the novel from the pinnacle of modern cultural achievement.

This is why emerging nations strive to beget great novels. During the years of America’s rise, for instance, the project of the “great American novel” was conscious and determined. Industry alone would not make the United States great: to grow beyond Europe it needed to match Flaubert and Tolstoy. In 1897, the novelist Frank Norris wrote that American writers should be focused on the task of creating the novel “which is the most thoroughly American in its tone and most aptly interprets the phases of American life”.

The same challenge has continued to define American writing and literary taste ever since. In awarding the 2001 National Book Award to Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections, the jurors explained that the novel had proved Franzen “one of the most astute interpreters of the American mind and spirit”.

Full report here National  

"Polyphony and Contradictions Are Considered Indispensable in India"

Ever since Salman Rushdie's novel Midnight's Children won the prestigious Man Booker Prize in 1981, there has been a whole series of very successful Indian writers. Hans Dembowski discussed the significance of bestseller writers such as Aravind Adiga, Arundhati Roy and Shashi Tharoor with Anant Kumar.

Who is the audience of Indian authors that write international bestsellers?
Well, on the Indian subcontinent, there is only a small stratum of society that has a sufficient command of English to read these books in their original version. Authors who write in one of the Indian languages reach a much larger number of people. In India, the authors of international bestsellers are often only known by name, either from the newspapers or the radio – yet the books themselves are hardly taken notice of. Commercial success is something that the authors in question primarily enjoy in English-speaking countries abroad.

Indian authors attract global attention to critical observations about their own country. Are they considered with scepticism? Only recently, I listened to an Indian literary critic who was upset about Aravind Adiga's White Tiger. I, for my part, appreciated the vivid depiction of the violence-prone relationship between rich and poor.
Indeed, many Indians feel that people abroad are only interested in India's poverty and the country's immense social disparities, and both phenomena, of course, are real. Whenever writers choose such topics, some people are swift to accuse them of slander. Often, they merely notice that dark sides of Indian reality have become the subject of literature, and they fear for the country's image.
These topics, however, actually cry out for literary attention. The tendency was obvious in the late 1990s, when Arundhati Roy won the Booker Prize for The God of Small Things. Her book tells of poverty and violence between religious communities – and straight away, she was accused of denigrating India. The book itself, that I happen to rate quite high, didn't play a major role in India

Full interview here Qantara.de

'Indian writers in India don't get the respect Indian writers in America get'

Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger, the Man Booker Prize-winning novel about class tensions in India has been optioned for a film adaptation by a distinguished Hollywood producer. The paperback edition of the book continues to be among the top 15 books in The New York Times bestseller list; last week it was number 13. And soon Adiga will have his new book published by Simon & Schuster who also was behind his first book.

Called Between the Assassinations, a novel in stories, it deals with the themes that worry Adiga - social inequities, challenges from fundamentalists and threats to freedom of expression and Indian democracy. An interview on rediff.

Read full interview

Oxford Literary festival on, scarce Indian participation

The Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival is on from March 29 to April 5.

The Indian participation is limted to Aravind Adiga, last year's Man Booker-winner, who will discuss his novel The White Tiger.

Over 350 writers are in Christ Church to talk, debate, and discuss ideas at this year’s festival. Simon Schama, Ian McEwan, John Carey, AS Byatt, PD James, Robert Harris, the Orange prize-winner Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Niall Ferguson, Louis de Bernières, the biographers Richard Holmes and Michael Holroyd, Kate Adie, Howard Jacobson, David Starkey, Jenny Uglow, Andrew O'Hagan and Adam Phillips are just some of the authors who will be attending. With prices held at last year's levels, an inspiring programme for children throughout the week and a tempting selection of dinners, quizzes, films and other events, the festival provides a perfect spring break for book lovers.

Global winners of Commonwealth book awards announced

The regional winners of the Commonwealth Writers' Prizes for Best Book and Best First Book were announced on March 12. Jhumpa Lahiri has been nominated for Unaccustomed Earth in the best book category. The prize is worth £1,000.

Two Canadian authors, Marina Endicott and Joan Thomas, have won awards with the Commonwealth Writers' Prize.

Winners by region:
AFRICA:
• Best Book: Mandla Langa of South Africa for The Lost Colours of the Chameleon
• Best First Book: Uwem Akpan of Nigeria for Say You're One of Them
Langa prevailed over authors such as Damon Galgut (The Imposter) and Zoë Wicomb (The One That Got Away) while Akpan won over authors such as Jane Bennett (Porcupine) and Jassy Mackenzie (Random Violence).

EUROPE AND SOUTH ASIA:
• Best Book: Jhumpa Lahiri of the UK for Unaccustomed Earth
• Best First Book: Mohammed Hanif of Pakistan for A Case of Exploding Mangoes
Hanif was up against writers such as Joe Dunthorne (Submarine) and Sulaiman Addonia (The Consequences of Love) for the prize, while Lahiri beat out writers such as Chris Cleave (The Other Hand) and Salman Rushdie (The Enchantress of Florence).

SOUTH EAST ASIA AND THE PACIFIC:
• Best Book: Christos Tsiolkas of Australia for The Slap
• Best First Book: Mo Zhi Hong of New Zealand for The Year of the Shanghai Shark
Tsiolkas beat out authors such as Aravind Adiga (Between the Assassinations) and Tim Winton (Breath) while Mo Zhi Hong triumphed over Adiga (The White Tiger) and Nam Le (The Boat).
The winners in each category will be announced at a ceremony in New Zealand on May 16, 2009.

CANADA AND THE CARIBBEAN REGION:
• Best Book: Marina Endicott of Canada for Good to a Fault
• Best First Book: Joan Thomas of Canada for Reading By Lightning.

Endicott won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize Best Book Award, for Canada and the Caribbean, for her novel Good to a Fault. The novel recounts the chaotic journey a lonely woman and her family take after a car accident. "With delicate precision, Good to a Fault tackles some of the big, eternal questions — love, mortality, God — in a deceptively modest story populated with very ordinary people brought together in extraordinary circumstances," said Michael Bucknor, chair of the judging panel for the Canada and Caribbean region, in a statement.

The winners in each category will be announced at a ceremony in New Zealand on May 16, 2009.