Slumdog Millionaire
by Vikas Swarup
2005

This is a difficult review to write because I did enjoy the book a lot, but also have so many warnings to give before actually recommending it. For example: there is a lot of sexual violence. And also a distinct current of poverty porn (sort of on the level of Oliver Twist). And the dog dies. Also a lot of people die. There’s racism, sexism, classism, homophobia, and general normalized corruption. But it’s also really fun?

The book reminds me of the movies Being There and Forest Gump. Our main character, Ram Mohammad Thomas, is not simple-minded like Gardner or Gump, but he is uneducated, and the premise of all three stories is that the main characters live these wild lives that fit together perfectly by pure providence.

The premise of this book is that Ram has just won a game show by correctly answering thirteen increasingly difficult trivia questions in a row. The game show accuses him of cheating because there’s no way for him to have the level of education to know the answers. The over-all structure of the book is divided into a chapter per question, with Ram telling his lawyer about the portion of his life that led to him knowing the answer to the specific question even if he didn’t know the subject in general. He’s only eighteen, but his life is just this wild ride of being an orphan raised by a priest, sent to an orphanage, acquired by a beggar gang, working as a servant, working as a waiter, running from the police, and meeting all these different people with their own wild stories. 

There’s this huge cast of idiosyncratic characters and while many of the experiences are either traumatic or end in tragedy or both, Ram rolls with it all in a “this might as well happen” way. There’s also a strong thread of situational humor to go along with the horror that makes for a delightful if somewhat boggling experience.

Plus, there are some amazing plot twists, both in the individual chapters and in the overall book plot arc.

I really enjoyed this book, and it covered rough ground extremely lightly, but any potential reader should decide for themselves if they’re up for trying it.

I did wonder if I needed to watch the movie, if only to see how they dealt with all the trauma and also how they would cover so many stories without being at least ten hours long. Since I’d just read the book, I went ahead and read a summary of the movie and the movie solved both problems by sharing only the premise and structure of the book while changing the character and life history completely to something a lot more generic. Which, in my opinion, really misses the point.