Sam Sacks
Kenzaburo Oe’s novel The Changeling (translated by Deborah Bolivar Boehm) begins in a tried-and-true fashion: with a dead body and a suitcase of posthumous correspondence that may contain the secrets behind the tragedy. Internationally esteemed film director Goro Hanawa has leapt to his death from his Tokyo apartment window. Intertwining the stories of Aravind Adiga’s second book, Between the Assassinations, a self-described “novel in stories,” is the blandly anodyne voice of a travel guide writer introducing the visitor to Kittur, a city on the southwest Indian coast where the book is set. The cheerful pabulum of the travel guide’s spiel works as an ironic counterpoint to the boiling class resentment at the forefront of the stories. “After a lunch of prawn curry and rice at the Bunder, you may want to visit the Lighthouse Hill and its vicinity,” suggests our affable guide, but the person going to Lighthouse Hill