The Book Depository The Accidental Apprentice by Vikas Swarup
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Price: £11.38
Brand: The Book Depository
Description: The Accidental Apprentice : Paperback : Simon & Schuster Ltd : 9781471113178 : : 26 Sep 2013 : From the author of the book behind the blockbuster movie Slumdog Millionaire, a brilliant novel about life changing in an instant. The Book Depository The Accidental Apprentice by Vikas Swarup - shop the best deal online on thebookbug.co.uk
Category: Books
Merchant: The Book Depository
Product ID: 9781471113178
MPN: 9781471113178
GTIN: 9781471113178
Author: MisterHobgoblin
Rating: 5
Review: It would be easy to dismiss Vikas Swarup as a writer of fluff. His stories are stylized, cartoonish. The colours are bright and the characters are extremes. Plot-lines stretch credulity to breaking point as a support cast dances in geometric patterns on the station platforms. And the endings are always happy. It's Bollywood in a book. But within all the schamltz and glitz, there's something much deeper. By taking what are essentially short stories, fitting them into a super-contrived TV gameshow format, Swarup is able to shine a light onto modern Indian society. Unusually, The Accidental Apprentice centres around a middle class family. Sapna Sinha is an educated young woman who works as a sales assistant in a high end electrical showroom in Delhi's Connaught Place. She has money to buy treats and take auto-rickshaw rides. Yet she resents her job and her place in the hierarchy; she believes she deserves more. Sapna's family may find themselves in straitened circumstances following the death of her father, but they still have a roof over their heads, food in their bellies and room to dream of TV stardom. Through a framing device of a wealthy businessman who wants to appoint Sapna as CEO of his corporation, Sapna is taken on something of a tour, meeting TV celebrities, journalists, wealthy moguls, police officers, government bureaucrats, poor farmers and child labourers. The stories are fairly self-contained but do have some thread of continuity running through. There are paradigm shifts aplenty as we are convinced that characters are good, then bad, then good again. Everyone stands a chance of redemption in this story, right up until the very end. But, of course, not everyone takes the opportunity... Beneath the storyline, Swarup confronts the reader with questions about how far it is right to trade one's own ethics for the prospect of prizes. Sapna and her family are no saints and they have pretty materialistic aspirations. At times, they are selfish and vindictive. They can be quite cynical in achieving their ends. Yet their very capitalist struggle is one which does engage the reader. There are questions, too, about whether India is selling its soul in exchange for development. And if so, whether it is a price worth paying. The ending of the story is satisfying, even if, by that point, the reader has accepted it as fantasy. The many loose ends are tied up, one after another, in an epilogue. Overall, The Accidental Apprentice is a polished gem that may well provoke deeper thought than one first expects.
Author: David Porter
Rating: 3
Review: Really engaging story within which you learn little bits of life in India (well Delhi) but often found the style of writing a bit awkward and clunky which detracted from my concentration. Read it because I heard a bit of the R4 adaptation, the book has a lot more detail and intricacy which I liked.
