Amnesty by Aravind Adiga

 Amnesty by Aravind Adiga was our September book club book. 

Danny is in Australia with the proper paperwork since he overstayed an educational visa.  He's taken on jobs as a housecleaner, is dating a woman named Sonja, and pretty much tries to pretend it's not a problem in his life that his immigration status is looming. 

Honestly this was not a winner for us in our book club. The first part is quite disjointed and it's hard to follow. About halfway through the book I got into a rhythm and started to understand the style, but it wasn't my favorite.  

It's a book about how a country will strict immigration laws treats its undocumented immigrants poorly. It's a book about how if you're born in some countries, there is no conceivable way out of the class to which your born. It's about how stateless people struggle in this world. And there's no hope in any of it.  What a bummer.  If that's your jam, have at it.  But it was overwhelmingly sad and oppressive and made me depressed for days.  

Lines of Note:

Easiest thing in the world, becoming invisible to white people, who don't see you anyway; but the hardest thing is becoming invisible to brown people, who will see you no matter what. (page 49)

One evening he disemburdened himself of a question that had bothered him for two and a half years.  A question about the water in Australia. "Do they put blue color every night in Sydney Harbor?" Radha ordered him to explain the question. "They spray wax on the apples in supermarkets," he said, "to make them red. Right? Maybe they do the same with Sydney Harbor. The ocean in Sri Lanka does not look this blue." (page 90)

There is a buzz, a reflexive retinal buss, whenever a man or woman born in India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, or Bangladesh sees another from his or her part of the world in Sydney - a tribal pinprick, an instinct always reciprocal, like the instantaneous recognition of homosexuals in a repressive society. (page 140)

If it has names like flat white, latte, or doppio, if it is hand-brewed by men or women who wear aprons, and served in porcelain at a cost of four dollars a cup, then it is what white Australians call coffee.  They insist that this coffee is very good - perhaps even the best in the world - or at least good enough to prove (along with universal health care, gun control laws, and a sense of irony) that their country is not America, not American, and not just a remote refueling stop for the U.S. Pacific Fleet. (pages 217-218)