December 24, 2009

autopilot leads to certain death




I recently read The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga. It's an excellent read if you haven't bothered to check it out yet. I thoroughly enjoyed it. The author has a dark humor that wins. The storyline builds well. The main character catches; he charms you. You know what he's capable of to begin with and so when he first reaches out to touch you, you're repulsed...but then he talks, weaves his story and soothes you and you're mesmerized. He reels you in totally.



to state what i just said with a bit more eloquence, I'll use David Martin's review from The Independent of London:
A dazzling narrative...An Indian novel that explodes the cliches--ornamental prose, the scent of saffron--associated with that phrase and a thrilling ride through a rising global power...Caught up in Balram's world--and his wonderful turn of phrase--the pages turn themselves. Brimming with idiosyncrasy, sarcastic, cunning and often hilarious, Balram is reminiscent of the endless talkers that populate the novels of the great Czech novelist Bohumil Hrabal. Inventing such a character is no small feat for a first time novelist.

I think perhaps I loved this book for all the reasons above but also because I could relate so much to the character. He's labeled a white tiger as a child--an exceptionally rare creature in his environment. Living in this small town with my views and my style, I certainly know this well. I feel, quite often, like I stick out like a sore thumb. But even more than that, something Balram talks about really hit home with the way I feel lately. He sees a white tiger in the zoo who paces his cage repetitively. If you've ever seen animals in small cages like this, you know they do just that....pace it. Back and forth. Back and forth. Balram states he knows that this repetition helps the tiger hypnotize himself into a state of calm so that he may deal with being caged.

Fuck, do I ever know that feeling. I live in a small town in rural South Georgia. I'm not religious. I'm not prejudiced. I work and go to school and have tattoos and short hair. I don't wear jeans and flip flops everywhere I go. My accent isn't the thickest and I don't care for atv riding or jet skiing or country music. It's just crazy to think I ended up so together in the face of such narrow mindedness. But here I am still. I haven't gotten out. It's like this place is my own prison...I'm stuck at least for the time being, but the last several months have been the hardest on me as far as realizing just how much I feel this sort of claustrophobic panic about living here.

I've paced through the years.... gotten into a routine and settling. Get up, go to work, drag through the day, go home, clean and take care of supper, etc. It was that way even when i was married. That routine hypnotized me into believing that everything here was everything I wanted. It was trickery...smoke and mirrors. In the past few months, I have woken the fuck up. And for good reason. Let's recap the last 4 years. I got married, I bought a house, changed jobs, had a baby, lost my dad to cancer before we really had a chance to make amends, got divorced after some very unhappy months, totally did a 180 on a very important political issue after a lot of soul searching...god, what a journey, graduated, applied for grad school, lost my grandfather, and more... My point here is that it's hard to pace, to stick to a routine when you have so much going on. Impossible. My autopiloted spin through life was fucked and I want out of here...this shithole area I was born into. I want out badly....to break out of this life I was born into much like Balram except I'd really rather not kill anyone to get out of it.

As Balram quotes, "I was looking for the key for years, but the door was always open."

This isn't my cage, my prison. The door is just waiting for me to turn that knob

read the book motherfuckers. you can buy it here

1 Comments:

wastingawesome said...

definitely a good read from an author who is neither north-american or european. there should be more of those guys.

i saw a white tiger do figure eights at the chicago zoo years ago. since then i have wondered what good a dizzily depressed tiger can do for a metropolitan zoo. He was alone too. i mean walking around in circles is way more fun if you can fuck every now and then, right?

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about me. not really.

dear you,

i don't talk about my child or being a mom. i don't talk about my garden. i won't mention my craftiness (often) or how much i save each week with coupons. if you're looking for that sort of thing, you're in the wrong place.

instead, let's abandon the tethers of domestication for a moment and remember what it's like to laugh at vulgarity and the world at large.

xo,

j

talk amongst ourselves


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