Book Review This Booker winner of 2011 is a short novel that takes you to peaks of insights and intellectual probes into life. But the plot nosedives to the standards of mediocre thrillers with the suspense revealed at the end. The author is a brilliant writer and hence the reader is not left disappointed in spite of that apparent flaw. What is life? This is the most fundamental question raised by the novel. Can it be understood and explained by logic and reason? Can people live together without causing “damage” to one another? How do we react to the ineluctable damage? Is life mostly about the damages and our responses to them? “Some admit the damage, and try to mitigate it; some spend their lives trying to help others who are damaged; and then there are those whose main concern is to avoid further damage to themselves, at whatever cost. And those are the ones who are ruthless, and the ones to be careful of.” (44) * Adrian and Anthony are two of the four
Cerebrate and Celebrate