Title: The White Tiger
Author: Aravind Adiga
Year Published: 2008
Awards/Recognitions : 2008 Booker Prize Winner
I bought this book right after it was announced the winner of last year's Man Booker Prize expecting a good read, but I was a bit disappointed.
"The White Tiger" is a novel composed of letters from Balram Halwai, nicknamed the white tiger, to the Premier of China, narrating his rise from rags to riches. This story isn't your regular rags to riches story with overwhelming amounts of luck wonderful people who help in achieving each other's dreams, and the perfect soulmate but one which includes heinous crimes. Balram narrates how he had to make his way to the top while contrasting the extreme poverty of the town he grew up in to the extreme wealth of the people whom he later worked for in New Delhi. This book is all about extremes, looking at opposite sides of the picture with vivid imagery. Though in doing this, we fail to see India as a whole, we fail to see its good side and its good people.
Adiga then makes up for his biased views with writing with metaphors and personifications in a grand scale. He was able to utilize these figures of speech to bring the reader to a world of filth, anger, lust, and greed. One example is when he made the whole city of New Delhi speak to Balram and persuade him to commit his crime, giving the reader a chill of foreboding that one gets when walking at dark streets.
If there was one thing I remember from reading this book is how much I hated the main character, Balram. At first, you will be on his side, knowing about the difficulties he suffered as an impoverished child but as the story progresses your sympathy then plummets to a zero up to the point where you get to loathe him. His pride and self-centeredness overflows from the book. Even if there are times where he tries to justify his actions, it doesn't really work unlike that of Nabokov's Humbert.
"The White Tiger" is one of the less known Booker prize winners, winning no other prizes and garnering no other, if not a few, recognitions. This is probably due to its overly simple plot using an overly used setting without really bringing something new to the table, it probably just won because of some great literary techniques thrown in. The novel is easily overshadowed by other Booker Prize winners which used India as its focus or setting such as Desai's The Inheritance of Loss, Roy's The God of Small Things, and Rushdie's Midnight's Children.
The novel is basically "Slumdog Millionaire" minus the game show, Latika, and all of the kind-heartedness, then add in theft, prostitution, and murder. I do not really recommend this book, but if you want to read something new and is comfortable with a simple plot and all the grime of India's extremes, then go ahead.
Rating: 5/10
Favorite Passage: "The story of a poor man's life is written on his body, in a sharp pen (The White Tiger)"
Edition: Atlantic Books Paperback
Length: A little over 300 pages.
Time Read: 1 Day
2 comments:
This book's in my reading queue, which is why I was interested to read your thoughts.
The Booker prize is sometimes hit or miss for me. And typically, they chose another novel set in India. I think they're apologizing for their colonial sins.:)
Hahaha, I totally agree with you, though most Indian novels that have won in the past were great books, this one unfortunately breaks the record...
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