Netflix has found a market in India and bouyed by the success of Sacred Games it already has many original content lined up for the next few months. One such series is based on Aravind Adiga's book Selection Day. What better time to revisit the book.

Selection day is about two brothers who have been pushed into cricket , one earmaked as a protege , the other always tagged as not a protege. With various characters around the brothers Adiga explores moral and political corruption while the game grows to be a behemoth . Adiga's booker prize winning novel The White Tiger described with a humourous tint India's struggle with the classist society . While you can see the mastery of Adiga when he approaches these themes , you can also see his growth as a writer when he explores the sexuality and religion of his characters.

Adiga doesnt try to hide in his novel the fact that he was setting for the protege to fail. In fact he positively pushes you into it with his various references (the Sachin vs Kambli one appears too). However that doesnt detract from the experience. What does though is the rather simplistic resolutions provided to a few of the conflicts . You end up wanting more as you reach the end.
Adiga is one of favourite writers of Indian origin and his skills as a writer are something I wish to emulate if I can. But selection day just needed a bit more.
Maybe the Netflix series will do it more justice.

This was disappointing. I very much enjoyed The White Tiger, and have continued reading Adiga's work on the strength of that debut. But this is a far cry from that promising start.

The story here is about two brothers, Radha and Manju, who are raised by an abusive father who single-mindedly drives them to become star cricket players. (Not knowing anything about cricket is not a barrier to understanding the storyline, btw.). We watch these brothers as Selection Day approaches, the day when their cricket dreams will come true. But Radha, who has the desire to play, struggles with his cricket ability as time goes on. And Manju, the natural talent, is conflicted about his desire to play. That's the simplistic summary.

The real meat of this story should have surrounded the brothers' struggle with their father, who is likely mentally ill and both physically and sexually abusive. Or Manju's struggles with his sexuality in a country where homosexuality is illegal. Or the family's struggle with how to respond after Radha turns violent. But the book cautiously edges around all of these things.

Another reviewer described the book as offering up cricket as a microcosm for modern India, and I think that is a key theme, and maybe even an interesting one. The problem for me is that I don't want to read a 300-page metaphor. I'm happy for the metaphor to be part of it, but a novel also needs a good story with fully formed characters. But Adiga's insistence on only approaching the most serious issues sideways, and then running away from them (his characters often literally run away), just didn't cut it for me. I'm left with a not especially interesting story peopled with (almost all male) characters that were shallow and often one-dimensional. None of whom seem to take any significant lesson out of the journey.

I'm afraid this is the end of the road for me with this author.

Selection Day is a wonderful story set largely in the poorest parts of India and filled with complex and interesting characters. It is the story of a father's passionate hopes for his sons to rise above his own station in life and become heroes in the world of cricket. The father places extreme pressures on his sons to fulfill the dream he has for them and, by association, to experience the glory of having his children become cricket idols. It is the story of how the father's single-minded drive impacts on his sons' relationships with him, with each other, with the wider community and with the game of cricket, itself. It is also a story about prejudice and acceptance, denial and acknowledgement and ultimately the realisation that we are the product of all our experiences. Highly recommended. Thanks to Scribner and Netgalley for the ARC.

"Manju had a horrible premonition about intimacy: it could be this simple, this could be how something starts - just because he asks you twice to tell him your story."

Eigentlich gefallen mir die Bücher von Aravind Adiga. Nur mit diesem hier hatte ich Mühe. Vielleicht liegt es daran, dass ich von Cricket so absolut keine Ahnung habe? Vielleicht, wer weiss. Auf jeden Fall wurden das Buch und ich nicht wirklich warm miteinander.

Erst mit Auftauchen Javeds wurde die Geschichte ein wenig interessanter und gewann etwas an Tempo. Eigentlich wären auch die Beziehungen zwischen den Brüdern und auch zum Vater interessant gewesen, auch die Beziehung der Gesellschaft zum Sport... Es gab jede Menge Themen, die einen hätten packen können.

Aber die Masse der Probleme und Konflikte hat dem Potential, das dieser Idee innewohnte, den Garaus gemacht. Hätte Adiga sich auf ein oder zwei Themengebiete konzentriert - es hätte etwas werden können. So ist es aber schlussendlich ein überladenes Buch ohne Zug geworden.

Drei Sterne für gute Beschreibungen der heutigen indischen Gesellschaft und ihrer Gefahrenzonen.

This book was also not my cup of tea. The plot originally intrigued me, because I thought it was going to be about cricket, reaching for your dreams, working hard for something YOU want...the family drama of trying to be better than your siblings. And in part it was this.. and others I'm not even sure what was happening. The way this novel was written it just didn't flow. It's also hard to enjoy a book where the main character is as unlikable as Manju. It was definitely a struggle for me to finish this novel...but I completed it.

A bad book by a good writer. Too many unnecessary details and climax is missing.