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The White Tiger A Novel Aravind Adiga Books

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The White Tiger A Novel Aravind Adiga Books

“The White Tiger” is written as a letter from Balram Halwai to the Chinese prime minister in which Balram offers himself as an example of an Indian entrepreneur. He tells of his impoverished childhood in a small village, a few years of schooling before his family sends him to work in a tea shop and how he eventually gets a job as the chauffeur for one of the married sons of the local wealthy family that controls everything in the village from the economy to the lives of the residents. The Americanized son and his wife are tasked with moving to Delhi and greasing any palms necessary to keep the family interests going. Balram quietly goes about his job—until the day he murders his boss—a fact he readily admits early on in the novel. He then uses his ex-boss’s money to start what becomes a very successful business.

Aravind Adiga does an exceptional, and often funny, job of weaving many of India’s problems into his tale: large scale poverty, rampant corruption, class inequality, inadequate education. He creates a poor but smart, hard-working protagonist you want to like and root for, but who is also a smug, amoral murderer. Balram seems so pleasant that I kept reading to find out what drove this seemingly docile man to murder. The implications of Balram as a symbol of lower class Indians (polite and eager to please while seething underneath), are plenty uncomfortable. Adiga never gets preachy or long-winded. Much like Mohsin Hamid’s 2014 novel, “How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia,” “The White Tiger” entertains and disturbs all at once.


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The White Tiger A Novel Aravind Adiga Books Reviews

White Tiger

It's obvious why Adiga won The Mann Booker Prize. The writing is precise and crisp, and the structure is unique – writing to the Premier of China. I have read quite a number of books about India, and visited there a few years ago. It is every bit as he describes it. It is easy to get swept away into the old forts, palaces and ruins. But wider ruin that has been caused in India by corruption, out-of-control growth, and poverty, is endemic. William Dalrymple's book, The Age of Kali, written ten years prior to White Tiger, points to what has happened in cities such as Bangalore, which were known as park, tree and monument-filled cities. Those are all gone in the incessant, unplanned growth. And corruption supports it all.

Adiga posits that the caste system has collapsed into two castes Big Bellies and near starvation. The picture of venality painted by Adiga supports Dalrymple's contentions.

It is an ugly, sad novel that I fear is largely true.
4.5
Adiga's debut novel gives us on narrator who is, by turns, charming, repugnant, profound, egotistical, insightful, and much more, but always, always fascinating. Balram, when he introduces himself, is a self-made entrepreneur and a murderer. His story is told through a letter he writes to the Chinese Premier who will be visiting his country. His voice is unique and can stand with some of the best know 'narrators' of classic literature. That his is such a different voice from a underrepresented culture from much of the canon literature is perhaps what makes it more real - in that his tale is authentic to who he is, and the world in which he exists, but that world is likely so unfamiliar to the audience that it confounds expectation and forces us to look at our own stance and belief on many moral, philosophical, and religious topics.

Anyone who knows me, knows I tend to be highly critical of 1st Person narration for a number of reasons. To create a unique, memorable voice that tells the story is complicated - perhaps more so than many authors understand, despite 1st POV being the instinctual way to tell a story. Besides the need for a unique voice, 1st POV can only tell one story always filtered through the narrator and too often authors try to short-cut or work around this and find ways to tell another story that we are to believe is not filtered through the consciousness telling that story. Here, however, that is never the case. We are left with no doubt that the world Balram inhabits is all his.

Balsam offers to give the Premier insight into his country through his own tale of being born in a lower caste in the 'darkness', through his sporadic and limited education to the moment he gets lucky and becomes a driver for a wealthy man. Through his bizarre, amusing, shocking, winding tale, we do see an India that is far different than the Bollywood films or many popular books and films. Balram's world is filled with corruption, yet there is a level of honor within that established system. There is a hardness and a harshness to many of the lives presented, yet there is an acceptance of them that is surprising. Balram's life is one of service, yet he finds a door to freedom, albeit one that while revealed early on, takes an entire book to build to. When we first hear him refer to himself as a murderer, we want to dislike him - yet it is difficult to do. Bit by bit we are drawn into his world and his worldview. In the end, he participates in the very system he needed to escape from, but he does so on his own terms and with his moral sense in tact, leaving him feeling he at least is living in that system in a better, more moral way. The ability to convince the audience of the same is perhaps the real power of Balram, and Adiga.

My one criticism of the novel is that were moments that felt repetitive, that we'd covered that ground well and needed to move on. Fortunately, they were few and far between, and overall I was absorbed into Balram's world.

For this book, I alternated between the kindle version and the audio - and I have to say that the narrator on the audio version was excellent, bringing life to a diverse cast of characters with slight shifts in tone, rhythm, pitch, and subtly that was masterful. Considering the story is 1st POV, that the audio narrator had to filter all the characters through the storyteller, it was extremely well done because it felt like Balram was imitating those around him, giving us yet another layer of story.
“The White Tiger” is written as a letter from Balram Halwai to the Chinese prime minister in which Balram offers himself as an example of an Indian entrepreneur. He tells of his impoverished childhood in a small village, a few years of schooling before his family sends him to work in a tea shop and how he eventually gets a job as the chauffeur for one of the married sons of the local wealthy family that controls everything in the village from the economy to the lives of the residents. The Americanized son and his wife are tasked with moving to Delhi and greasing any palms necessary to keep the family interests going. Balram quietly goes about his job—until the day he murders his boss—a fact he readily admits early on in the novel. He then uses his ex-boss’s money to start what becomes a very successful business.

Aravind Adiga does an exceptional, and often funny, job of weaving many of India’s problems into his tale large scale poverty, rampant corruption, class inequality, inadequate education. He creates a poor but smart, hard-working protagonist you want to like and root for, but who is also a smug, amoral murderer. Balram seems so pleasant that I kept reading to find out what drove this seemingly docile man to murder. The implications of Balram as a symbol of lower class Indians (polite and eager to please while seething underneath), are plenty uncomfortable. Adiga never gets preachy or long-winded. Much like Mohsin Hamid’s 2014 novel, “How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia,” “The White Tiger” entertains and disturbs all at once.