What does it mean live in a world where not being seen is the only thing that will sustain you, but when being seen is the only thing that can keep your spirit alive?
Danny is struggling with just this question as an illegal immigrant in Aravind Adiga’s latest novel, Amnesty. Danny is a cleaner, cleaning away the secrets and mysteries of the privileged, white Aussies who refuse to do it for themselves. Those same people who see him only as the color of his skin or the thickness of his accent. Those people who see him as the same brown person from across the street or from that Southeast Asian restaurant. Danny spends his days both hiding from and trying to be seen by these people.
And then he meets Radha, a brown woman whose luxurious home he’s hired to clean. A woman who at first seems to genuinely care for him, who offers to help him, but who ends up being as corrupted and swallowed by the white-washed world she lives in. Radha is forced to take on a certain persona to protect herself from further degradation because of the color of her skin. She treats Danny like a pet, taking him to gamble and drink with her and her secret lover Prakash. Danny has left that life behind though, having refused to clean for Radha and her lover for months. Until the morning he’s cleaning a neighbor’s home and finds that Radha has been murdered.
Danny tries to convince himself that Radha’s murder was random, an act of violence committed by any person who might have had nothing against her. But he knows this isn’t true. He knows Prakash had something to do with it. He knows Prakash has murdered her. But what can he do? He, an invisible, illegal immigrant? Someone no one sees? Someone who spends his life trying to be invisible and slowly dying because of it?
Danny struggles with these fundamental moral questions as he weighs what it means to be human, to be a human who has suffered, to be a human who has an obligation to those around him even if they don’t look like him or want him.
A beautiful and poignant novel that tells a story that was dying to be told, Aravind Adiga’s Amnesty is a must read of 2020.
Slated for release by Scribner in February 2020, you can preorder a copy of Adiga’s Amnesty from your local independent bookstore.
Read more fiction book reviews at Centered on Books.
FTC Disclaimer: This book was given to me in return for a fair and honest review of the text.
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