Exodus

MITHRIDATES
Tell me if any of this sounds familiar:

• Palestinians desperate to get back the homeland that was taken from them despite being overwhelmingly out-armed by their enemies;
• Arms smuggled in to Palestine with humanitarian aid and the help and support of the bulk of the people, making it impossible for the occupier to stop the flow without choking off the population — and the Palestinians openly exploiting the humanity of the occupier;
• Palestinians bitterly split between one group that wants restraint and negotiation and another that favors terror and no compromise;
• Palestinians willing to sacrifice children for their cause;
• Europeans taking to the streets to protest the treatment of Palestinians;
• Palestinians unfairly comparing their adversaries to Hitler;
• Children growing up in refugee camps, hardened to the outside world;
• The Western power with the most influence in Palestine accused of favoring the wealthy and powerful over the oppressed;
• Palestinian terrorists bombing hotels and killing innocents;
• The occupier believing they are held to the strictest rules of engagement while the Palestinians obey no rules at all;
• Attacks by the occupier backfiring and uniting the various Palestinian groups;
• A proposed homeland comprised of just a couple of strips connected by narrow corridors.

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In Leon Uris' Exodus, however, "Palestinian" refers to the Jews in Palestine struggling to create a homeland. Yes, it's 50 years old, and yes, I was inspired to read it by a TV show on a network I should be boycotting. Yes, the characters are inevitably overly courageous, overly good, overly evil, overly something. No, Leon Uris is never going to top any list of great literature. But who says we have to spend every minute reading great literature when we can just read great stories, instead?

The fact that the book is 50 years old can shed some light. With all the revisionist history out there, it's almost impossible to get a present-day account of the creation of Israel that's worth the protest page it's spouted on.

Exodus is good stuff and still pretty damn relevant. It's certainly written from one side's perspective, but find me an Israel-hater who can still say with certainty, after reading this book, that these people have no right to their homeland; find me an Israel-supporter who, after reading this book, doesn't sympathize a bit with Palestinians growing up in refugee camps and acknowledge this people's right to a homeland.

It's hard to believe some of it, considering all the acrimony out there, but the story from the early part of the twentieth century is of Jews and Arabs living in the same or neighboring villages in relative peace. (Well, except for the occasional riot and rampage.)

And then there's this probably true, but morally horrifying justification for the actions of the Palestinian terrorists:

Nothing we do, right or wrong, can ever compare to what has been done to the Jewish people. Nothing the Maccabes do can even be considered an injustice in comparison to two thousand years of murder.

It gets right to the heart of the matter, doesn't it? Hardened refugees with a history of victimization believing that any action is therefore justified. There's no way to do justice to the Arab-Israeli conflict in a novel (let alone a single blog post), but the exercise of going back in time half a century is good for some perspective. It's great drama, anyway. And the "Palestinians" get their homeland!

Havana Nocturne: How the Mob Owned Cuba and Lost It to the Revolution

PHUTATORIUS
Assassins turn their guns on Albert Anastasio, the notorious capo of a national contract-murder syndicate, in his New York City barber shop. Mobbed-up casino owners arrange a sex party for then-Senator John F. Kennedy in Havana (and later kick themselves for failing to film it). A young Fidel Castro abandons ship nine miles off the Cuban coast to escape a rival with homicidal intentions. I gotta say, Havana Nocturne is a fun read.

T.J. English's plot is straightforward: he lays it all out in the book's subtitle. American gangsters see opportunity in Havana's licentious nightlife — gambling! glitz! girls! — Mob cultivates a partnership with ex-President Fulgencio Batista, Batista retakes power, and Havana really starts to hop. Batista has a strong hand politically but manages to overplay it. The revelry in Havana ends — poetically — in the wee hours of New Year's Day, 1959, as Castro's revolutionaries put Batista to flight and swarm over the city. A six-year party, followed by a fifty-year (and counting) hangover.

By now we're all familiar with the broad contours of this history, and English doesn't add much from a big-picture standpoint. There's no innovative historical argument here, no challenge to the conventional wisdom. It's the richness of detail that makes this book such a good read. It's the synthesis of sources, the cobbling together of a hundred gripping, tabloid-quality anecdotes of sleaze, corruption, excess, debauchery, murder, repression, insurgency, and riot. Oh — and Sinatra, too. How could anyone not want to read this book?
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Two dynamic personalities drive the narrative here, and neither of them is Batista. The first is Meyer Lansky. Lansky, an unheralded Mob organizer and financier — and onetime protegé of Arnold Rothstein, scourge of baseball fans the world over — was the visionary who, along with Lucky Luciano, founded "the Commission," a sort of national governing board for the Mafia and later led the Commission's bid to colonize Havana's tourism and entertainment industry. Hyman Roth's character in The Godfather, Part II is modeled after Lansky. The other mover and shaker is Fidel Castro, and of course we know all about him.

It should not be surprising that Lansky and Castro's stars were in opposition. As English tells it, these two were polar opposites in every way — they were matter and anti-matter (you can decide which was which). Castro, the son of a prosperous landowner family, grew up in the country; Lansky was raised in poverty on Manhattan's Lower East Side. Lansky was disciplined, deliberate, and pragmatic, as much of a "peacemaker" as any gangster can be (the Anastasio hit notwithstanding); Castro is aggressive and confrontational, the consummate risk-taker. Lansky survived and thrived by flying under the radar — of law enforcement, of his Mob colleagues, of American journalists obsessed with the Mafia. Castro promoted a cult of personality that put himself forward as the very embodiment of the People's Revolution.

English works hard to place Lansky's Havana Mob and Castro's 26th of July movement in tension, but the truth is that his book tells two parallel narratives. The only point of connection between Lansky and Castro is Batista's regime, the fixed point around which these two characters pivot. Lansky's Havana "scene" parties on, at first blissfully, then willfully ignorant of the threat posed by Castro; meanwhile, Castro soldiers on in the mountains, plotting his revolution. He is aware of the influence of American gangsters in Cuba, but his obsession is with Batista — always Batista. If anything, it is surprising that these two elements could coexist in Cuba for as long as they did. It's clear that this island wasn't big enough for the both of them, and one man's ascendance necessarily excluded the other. For all that, though, Lansky and Castro's respective crews never came into active conflict, English's book is a bit anticlimactic as a result, and you can almost feel the author chafing at that fact.

If English advances a thesis at all, it is a subconscious one. He doesn't argue the point, but you can't help but get the feeling that this ending was foreordained. Lansky's plans could never have worked, in the long term. The active ingredient in the Mob's Cuba formula was a government partner that would sell the country's guts and soul to foreign investors for a cut of the take. Without Batista — and exactly Batista — Lansky and his partners in the Syndicate would never have gained their foothold in Havana. And yet Batista's was exactly the sort of regime that can never sustain itself. In retrospect, it's hard to see the Mob's Havana holiday as anything but a time-limited proposition. What was not predictable, necessarily, is that Fidel would not allow the Mob to co-opt him into its Cuba project. Turns out you can refuse an offer from the Mafia. This might explain why, after managing somehow to survive that first refusal, Castro is still around.


UPDATE: For all you doubters about the long-term prospects of This Thing of Ours, it's worth pausing to consider Lansky and Luciano's fruitful partnership — proof positive that a Jew and an Italian can work together and succeed in this world. FO is the Internet's "Commission," and don't you forget it.

Kurt Vonnegut Saw This Coming

PHUTATORIUS
. . . or something like it, anyway, in his 1985 novel, Galápagos:

The thing was, though: When James Wait got there, a worldwide financial crisis, a sudden revision of human opinions as to the value of money and stocks and bonds and mortgages and so on, bits of paper, had ruined the tourist business not only in Ecuador but practically everywhere.
* * *
Mexico and Chile and Brazil and Argentina were likewise bankrupt — and Indonesia and the Philippines and Pakistan and India and Thailand and Italy and Ireland and Belgium and Turkey. Whole nations were suddenly . . . unable to buy with their paper money and coins, or their written promises to pay later, even the barest essentials. Persons with anything life sustaining to sell, fellow citizens as well as foreigners, were refusing to exchange their goods for money. They were suddenly saying to people with nothing but paper representations of wealth, "Wake up, you idiots! Whatever made you think paper was so valuable?"
* * *
The financial crisis, which could never happen today, was simply the latest in a series of murderous twentieth century catastrophes which had originated entirely in human brains.

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As it plays out in Galápagos, rioting, civil war, starvation and disease follow, and in the end (or rather, the beginning, as Vonnegut's ghost-of-a-narrator, Leon Trotsky Trout, tells the tale from a million years into the future) the last humans left alive are a gang of tourists, Ecuadoran refugees, and a ship's crew who find themselves shipwrecked on the island of Santa Rosalia in the Galápagos archipelago (say that five times fast). A million years later, these humans' descendants have evolved flippers and substantially smaller brains — advancements that, in the narrator-ghost's view, leave them much improved on their twentieth-century progenitors.

Did Vonnegut have it right? The last year has shown us Homo sapiens sapiens's capacity to outwit itself — and we find the fallout right where Vonnegut placed it two dozen years ago — in the delusional world of high finance. Could it be that our brains really are too big for our own good?

I think Kurt oversimplifies things a bit. If there's a big evolutionary flaw in the species, it's not that our brains are too big. It's that certain areas of our brains are overdeveloped, at the expense of others. The Ancient Greeks had two words for knowledge: tekne and sophia; these terms roughly correspond to "know-how" and "wisdom." It seems to me our tekne tends to get out ahead of our sophia, usually by about a decade or two. It's the tekne in us that enables us to develop intricate, destructive works of artifice like the atomic bomb and the collateralized debt obligation, and only years later does our sophia show us how our celebrated tekne has worked us into a corner. If only the sophia side of our big brains were more advanced, we might find ourselves in better stead.

It ought to be a sign unto us that the world's foremost economic minds (our vaunted "technocrats") crapped out in predicting the present state of affairs, but a wicked Juvenalian satirist like Vonnegut (a "philosopher?") saw it all coming as far back as the 1980s. Somewhere Vonnegut's own ghost is narrating today's events to a chuckling audience — and my guess is that he's taking no prisoners in the telling.

Love ya, Kurt.

Appraisal of Apple's Approach to App Approvals: Appalling!

PHUTATORIUS
Geez — this blog post couldn't be any more on the money: Apple's gatekeeping of iPhone apps is, as we lawyers are wont to say, arbitrary and capricious.
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That's not to say that Apple doesn't or shouldn't have the right to control what it sells through its App Store. But competent people ought to be managing the approvals. Or don't the folks at One Infinite Loop recognize that the worm turned a while ago, and they're not exactly hailed as the good guys anymore?

This sort of hardware-level censorship is exactly why you can't beat a good ol' PC and Internet connection — a point Jonathan Zittrain makes in spades in his latest book, The Future of the Internet and How To Stop It. Read the introduction at least. JZ's critique of the iPhone pre-dated Apple's opening-up of the iPhone to app-makers, but it's no less relevant now that Apple has positioned itself to make inane and discordant judgments re what is "iPhone-worthy."

Antony and Cleopatra

MITHRIDATES
I wanted to like this book. The whole Masters of Rome series is genius. Before you get discouraged by this review, go read The First Man in Rome and get to know Gaius Marius and a young Lucius Cornelius Sulla. The series maintains its relevance — even as the history becomes more familiar with the arrival of Pompey Magnus and Julius Caesar — because her characters are brilliant. McCullough does a masterful job of detailing Sulla's depravity, Pompey's arrogance, and Caesar's Johnson as a political weapon. But her enemies are great, too. You couldn't help but like Jugurtha, and Mithridates the Great (Holy gratuitous self-referencing, Batman!) won me over with his favorite punishment for incompetent subordinates:

Tongue out, eyes out, hands off, balls off, begging bowl!

But the best character of all is Marcus Antonius. This isn't the Antony of Shakespeare:

Friends, Romans, Countrymen, lend me your ears!
I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.
The evil that men do lives after them,
The good is oft interred with their bones;
So let it be with Caesar.

That Antony is noble, brave, brilliant, better than Caesar even, but of course with a fatal flaw.

But McCullough's Antony isn't even that of HBO's Rome series. Their Antony is still brilliant, and might have made the speech above, but he's almost completely amoral, and of course with the same fatal flaw. James Purefoy almost made us believe he was Antony himself. It was only HBO's obsession with gratuitous male full frontal nudity that confirmed he had one very un-Antonian feature.

No, McCullough's Antony is (was) my favorite of all. Completely amoral, sometimes brilliant, sometimes a buffoon, undeniably brave, as debaucherous as Sulla, and as vain as Pompey. This Antony wanted to kill Caesar himself so he could inherit his fortune, but was still indispensable to Caesar, who kept him at his side. He had lions pull his chariot, had as many women as he wanted, and routinely drank himself into week long stupors. He went to costume parties in tight fitting clothes to show off his legendary organ. I mean, what's not to like. This guys was everything — everything but dull.

That is, until Antony and Cleopatra. The guy's just pathetic through the entire book. Look, McCullough's limited with what she can do here. She can't make him beat the Parthians or triumph over Octavian — but at least she could have given the man his due and made this seem remotely plausible. Antony might not have been the general Caesar was, fair enough, but the campaign against the Parthians was a joke from the beginning. He whines the whole time and cries like a little girl afterwards. Sure he fell in love with Cleopatra — fine — but does he have to whimper and do nothing while she slowly drives away ally after ally?

The bravado, the charm, the occasional brilliance, the charisma — all gone right from the beginning. Instead of a tragic ending to a brilliant career, we get 500 pages of a pathetic driveling man standing by while a stupid woman slowly destroys him. It's not just sad, it's kind of boring. The same meeting — Cleopatra insults Antony's legates, Antony lets her, legates desert — happens over and over.

A brilliant series ends on a dull note. And Antony's sudden change from best character in the series to pathetic loser is neither entertaining nor plausible.

PHUTATORIUS
I haven't read this one yet, though I plan to. I keep finding other books to read first, and I think that's pretty telling.

I've felt for a while now that this series was heading downhill, and I've wondered why. I think a big part of it is that the historical and cultural record is thick with material that covers this period (say, from Caesar's career onward), and so McCullough not only has to contend with competing — sometimes Shakespearean — narratives, she's also telling stories most of us already know. Rome buff that I am, I couldn't have foretold the plot twists and turns in the earlier books on Marius, Sulla, and Pompey. But we all know what's coming here, for the most part.

Since she can't rely on a suspenseful plot, McCullough has to rely on other qualities to sustain our interest — principally, her detail work and her character development. It sounds to me like you feel she had a pretty good character in Antony, and she betrayed him.

I will say from my own experience failing at literature that I've written supporting characters that I like a heck of a lot — in some cases much more than the principals — but if I ever had to turn them into principal characters, I'd probably end up hanging myself. I think this is because the more peripheral a character is, the more he can get away with being a character, a work of artifice, rather than a more complete, developed person. With distance, a statue without detail can still look good. Up close it doesn't work. So when McCullough bids to make Antony her protagonist, she has to give him more depth and complexity — this undercuts the sharp and static elements that make him stand out, and he loses much of his appeal.

There's a bit of art imitating life here, too. I'd venture to say that Antony was the sort of person who did his best work as a supporting actor. When events wrenched Caesar away and the spotlight finally turned to him, he showed an astonishing lack of depth and standalone character — and that's what ultimately did him in.

MITHRIDATES
I'll agree with most of that. And I acknowledge that she had a difficult task. But I think Antony became more cardboard in this book. He still had plenty of depth in The October Horse — and he was already a principal character at that point — but he's just boring, pathetic and obvious in this last book.

You say the real Antony wasn't much without Caesar? Yet somehow he managed to orchestrate the defeat of the conspirators and carve up half the world for himself — all this from a pretty precarious situation immediately following Caesar's death. The real (and in every telling I've heard/read/seen, also the fictional) Antony is pretty damn remarkable from Caesar's death to Philippi. The real one eventually falls — we know that — but tell me how. Don't just remove everything useful and interesting from the guy and let him wallow until it's all over . . .

The Singapore Grip

PHUTATORIUS
This is the second of J.G. Farrell's three "Empire" books that I've read. The first was The Siege of Krishnapur, which I finished this summer. The Singapore Grip and Krishnapur follow the same action arc: British imperials realize their danger just a bit too late to avoid getting routed out of their colonial homes-away-from-home. Grip, which followed on the heels of Farrell's prize-winning Krishnapur, is just a bit more ambitious.

Where the entirety of the action in Krishnapur was contained within the (increasingly) harried and cramped quarters of a British magistrate's Residence in rural India (where mutinous sepoys have the English contingent cornered), Farrell gives his readers the run of 1940s Singapore — and, indeed, in some passages a peek into "upstate" Malaysia, where the fumbling British Army engages the advancing Japanese.

The book starts slowly — excruciatingly slowly, as Farrell introduces us to his characters and spins forth their petty preoccupations. Walter Blackett is the middle-aged, self-satisfied entrepreneur planning the 50th jubilee of his company, Blackett and Webb. He's trying to marry off his feisty daughter, Joan. Matthew Webb is newly arrived in Singapore. His father, Blackett's partner, has just died, and Matthew stands to inherit the business, notwithstanding his grave concerns about the workings of colonial capitalism. Might Matthew be a suitor for Joan, or does the American military attaché, Ehrendorf, have a monopoly on her affections? Matthew moves in with "The Major," a restless ex-pat who only dimly remembers his days on the Continent, and the cynical, world-wise Frenchman hanger-on Dupigny (The Cynical Frenchman is always a useful character type).

If you got through that last paragraph, you did better than I did. It took me months to push through the first 150 pages of this book. This is, I think, a difficulty with Farrell's work, as I had the same trouble with Krishnapur. That said, right about the time you're begging for something to break the tropical tedium, the Japanese military swoops in, sinks two British battleships, lands on the Malay peninsula, and commences air raids on Singapore. And the book takes off.

It was a kind of cluelessness that brought Singapore to its knees — and Farrell tells just how with wry humor and pointed commentary. His characters seem like stock characters at first: each one is vested with a particular point of view, and he seems to arrange for them to encounter one another simply so that they might debate the big questions of empire. Blackett's notion is that what's good for his company is good for Singapore — even as his business maneuvers undermine the Allied defense. We're introduced to Singapore through Matthew, fresh off a stint volunteering for the hopeless League of Nations. He's the self-interested Blackett's foil, arguing constantly for a kind of responsible communalism, if not communism outright. Dupigny can't miss an opportunity to roll his eyes at Matthew's idealism. The Major is the stiff-upper-lip Briton who stays above the argumentative fray and, against all odds, pulls a ragged multiracial bunch of dilettantes together into an effective volunteer firefighting corps. Joan, it turns out, is just a bitch (that's not my word: it's Matthew's).

In the end, it's the war that turns these cardboard cutouts into characters, and it's good work on Farrell's part. Farrell describes the particulars of the Japanese invasion and the British withdrawal/defense in considerable detail. You don't need to review the bibliography in the back of the book to know that it's been exhaustively researched. Somehow the history never burdens the plot. Once or twice Farrell's narrative turns away from the Singapore cast to consider the attack from the perspective of a Japanese infantryman. I'm not the biggest fan of these passages. Farrell's shtick is to tell these stories (Grip and Krishnapur) completely from the warped perspective of the hapless colonials, and these brief interludes seem like a bit of a cheat. But I get what he's driving at: while the British generals dither over internal military politics, while Walter Blackett machinates against his business rivals and diverts materials needed for the war effort into his jubilee floats, while Matthew makes and repeats his impassioned pleas for the world's people to come together and care for one another — the Japanese press southward, indefatigably, on a mission, and without distraction.

And that's really how this story goes. If you can survive the brutal build-up to the invasion, this is a worthy read, with some priceless moments (training day for the firefighting volunteers and General Percival and the sound of sawing wood leap to mind). I learned much that I did not know about this theater of the war, and I laughed quite a bit.

UPDATE: I forgot to add, as I intended to do, that I came across the word tarmacadam in this book. That'll be the Word of the Week.

To Rule the Waves

PHUTATORIUS
I finally finished Arthur Herman's To Rule the Waves: How the British Navy Shaped the Modern World — the first bit of nonfiction I've taken on in a while. It was somewhat of a slog at times, but never without a payoff.

Herman's book recounts the history of the Royal Navy from its early days as a ragtag assembly of privateers raiding Spanish treasure fleets — at that point, hardly a "navy" at all — to its final active combat mission off the Falkland Islands in 1982, well after it had ceded control of the seas to a younger, more dynamic American fleet. At the same time Herman tracks the rise and decline of Great Britain as a world power and describes the enduring impressions the British people made the world over, principally through their exercise of sea power.

To Rule the Waves nicely balances its argument and factual presentation with history-by-anecdote, and so it manages to inform and entertain in equal parts. Herman kicks off his work with a relation of John Hawkins's daring and desperate raid on San Juan de Ulloa, a Spanish installation in the Caribbean, in 1568. Robert Louis Stevenson could have written passages in this chapter, and they'd be no more compelling. Interwoven with battle narratives like these are more complex disquisitions on the Longitude Problem and the several overhauls and reorganizations of the Admiralty. A succession of larger-than-life personalities make up half the story here: Hawkins gives way to Drake, and from there Pepys, Anson, Hawke, Cook, Nelson, Cochrane, Fisher, Jellicoe, and Churchill, serving in a dual capacity as both historical figures and characters, all propel the plot forward in furious bursts. The other half of the story, in which the Navy's power grows incrementally with technological, organizational, and regulatory improvements, provides a kind of consistent backbeat that steadies Herman's prose.

At times Herman's enthusiasm for his subject matter seems to slip a bit, into unalloyed admiration of the actual Navy and, by Herman's metonymic argumentation, of Britain itself. The effect of this is incremental: by the end of the book any reasonable reader must, at least momentarily, regret that the sun should ever have set on this Empire. We're told that the press gangs weren't so brutal, and that Churchill probably overstated the extent of the "buggery" and the use of the "lash." We're told of the commercially favorable world order that the Royal Navy oversaw, not just on behalf of Britain — but for all nations. The word "empire," with all its negative connotations, does not surface very often. Herman prefers to talk of a Pax Britannia. Blame for the Navy's several notable defeats and reversals — it's all right, Arthur, nobody can win all the time — is with a kind of suspicious frequency lifted from the shoulders of the admirals and captains and laid at the feet of government mismanagement or Britain's lagging allies. Conversely, a recurring theme of the book is that the Navy (and Britain, and the world) thrived on its own mystique, such that the very appearance of a British ship in a port would be sufficient to quell a local crisis, and the Continent's wretched imperialists, French and Spanish alike, could not but turn their fleets away from near-certain victories out of deference to the Navy's indomitable presence. And I'd have gotten away with it, too — if it weren't for those meddling English ships! The gushing suggests at times that Herman has abandoned objectivity altogether.

But these biases do not detract from the book's learning, and if anything they are useful, because they remind the reader that there is a motivated author here: I found myself skeptical at times, but never cynical, and that's probably the best state of mind in which to read a work of history. For that matter, it's refreshing to read a work on this subject that does not get bogged down completely in lamenting the evils of empire. That's well-traveled territory — and deservedly so — but surely the upside of British power (such as it was) is a subject worth exploring, too. Maybe Herman's tendency to extend the benefit of the doubt is catching.

There are other possible explanations for the choices Herman makes. I gather that historians make much of their hay in "mythbusting," and it might be that motivation — challenging conventional understandings about the Navy, Churchill's bon mot being just one very reductive example — that drives some of Herman's more apologetic passages. As for his tendency to forgo criticism of Britain's imperial excesses, this might just be a result of the fine parsing of his subject matter: it became apparent to me as I read that the principal occasions for postcolonial complaint occurred on shore. The subjugation, the exploitation were, for the most part, out of the Navy's jurisdiction. The admirals may have been enablers, and there is complicity there, but by holding his focus on the Navy, Herman is able to emphasize what Britain gave the world over three centuries — most notably, the fruits of global exploration and navigation technology, security and support for international trade that drove economic growth, and a commitment to the human values and freedoms and rule of law that we continue to promote today. In the end, then, it should not be so troubling that the Navy occasionally resorted to press gangs to crew-up its ships, when at the same time it was undertaking systematic efforts to wipe out the African slave trade.

And maybe that's where I'll leave this. A dense but rewarding read, and I strongly recommend it.

The White Tiger

MITHRIDATES
So let's talk about India. Why? Because I'm going there in ten days and am reading a Man Booker Prize for Fiction winning novel by an Indian about India. OK, I know there was a terrible incident in Mumbai this past week, and it was truly awful, but I think it's been covered fairly thoroughly in the Mainstream Media and, quite frankly, I don't really have much to add. Well, except that I'm going to India anyway, you terrorist fuckwads!

Which brings me to The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga. Look, this obviously isn't the first time you've heard of this truly original novel. Not only do I think how the Economist wants me to think, but I read what the Economist wants me to read. But in case you haven't got around to it yet, please feel free to do so. The book is about social classes, freedom, tradition, and all sorts of other stuff, but the parts about Indian democracy are just brilliant — all through the eyes of an uneducated, impoverished villager. A few highlights to pique your interest:

• I was listening to a program on the radio about this man called Castro who threw the rich out of his country and freed his people.


• I gather you yellow-skinned men, despite your triumphs in sewage, drinking water, and Olympic gold medals, still don't have democracy. Some politician on the radio was saying that that's why we Indians were going to beat you: we may not have sewage, drinking water, and Olympic gold medals, but we do have democracy. If I were making a country, I'd get the sewage pipes first, then the democracy, then I'd go about giving pamphlets and statues of Gandhi to other people, but what do I know? I'm just a murderer!


• The Great Socialist himself is said to have embezzled one billion rupees from the Darkness, and transferred that money into a bank account in a small, beautiful country in Europe full of white people and black money.


• "It's the way it always is," my father told me that night. "I've seen twelve elections — five general, five state, and two local — and someone else has voted for me twelve times. I've heard that people in the other India get to vote for themselves — isn't that something?"


• They sat in silence, which confused me. If I had just gone into the President's House, I'd roll down the windows and shout it aloud to everyone on the road! "Look at that." "What?" "That Statue." I looked out the window to see a large bronze statue of a group of men — this is a well-known statue, which you will no doubt see in Delhi: at the head is Mahatma Gandhi, with his walking stick, and behind him follow the people of India, being led from darkness to light. The Mongoose squinted at the statue. "What about it? I've seen it before." "We're driving past Gandhi, after just having given a bribe to a minister. It's a fucking joke, isn't it?" "You sound like your wife now," the Mongoose said. "I don't like swearing — it's not part of our traditions here." But Mr. Ashok was too red in the face to keep quiet. "It is a fucking joke — our political system — and I'll keep saying it as long as I like." "Things are complicated in India, Ashok. It's not like in America. Please reserve your judgment."


• The jails of Delhi are full of drivers who are there behind bars because they are taking the blame for their good, solid middle-class masters. We have left the villages, but the masters still own us, body, soul, and arse. Yes, that's right: we all live in the world's greatest democracy. What a fucking joke. Doesn't the driver's family protest? Far from it. They would actually go bragging. Their boy Balram had taken the fall, gone to Tihar Jail for his employer. He was loyal as a dog. He was the perfect servant.


• The Great Indian Rooster Coop. Do you have something like it in China too? I doubt it, Mr. Jiabao. Or you wouldn't need the Communist Party to shoot people and a secret police to raid their houses at night and put them in jail like I've heard you have over there. Here in India we have no dictatorship. No secret police. That's because we have the coop. Never before in human history have so few owed so much to so many, Mr. Jiabao. A handful of men in this country have trained the remaining 99.9 percent — as strong, talented, as intelligent in every way — to exist in perpetual servitude; a servitude so strong that you can put the key of his emancipation in a man's hands and he will throw it back at you with a curse.

Oh, I could go on and on copying someone else's words. But why bother? Go read the book.