The White Tiger: A Novel

by Aravind Adiga

Book Overview

The stunning Booker Prize-winning novel from the author of Amnesty and Selection Day that critics have likened to Richard Wright's Native Son, The White Tiger follows a darkly comic Bangalore driver... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1416562605
• Release Date: October 2008
• Publisher: Free Press
• Length: 304 Pages
• Weight: 0.65 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.4" x 0.9" x 5.5"

Customer Reviews

Dark, gritty, exhilarating

"Unlike almost another Indian novel you might have read in recent years, this page-turner offers a completely bald, angry, unadorned portrait of the country as seen from the bottom of the heap; there’s not a sniff a saffron or a swirl of sari anywhere…” Once I read that review by the Sunday Times, I knew I had to read this. True, there is no love story here. This is the story of seen from someone from extreme poverty. But this is more than a story of corruption, murder, and money. This is the story of Delhi, Bangalore, and the grim reality of the millions of lives that live in those two cities. Balram also tells us the story of life seen from the other side and his eventual escape from poverty, albeit through unsavory means. Balram tells us about his point of view from the deepest pits of poverty. A side seething with tension and jealousy. A side that many people will never hear, much less think, about. The forgotten ones. A fall from grace, a coming of age (or enlightenment) story, darker and grittier version of Slumdog Millionaire, this book is all three of the above. Unapologetic and an eye-opener, this book deserves the attention it gets and then some. Living and working in Bangalore for a while now, I can say that this book paints a "truer" picture of what I see in India. The country where the rich and poor live at an uncomfortable extremes and contradictions exist around every corner. True, there are smells of saris and saffron in India. But that description only paints half of the picture. Leave it to Aravind Adiga to paint the rest for you.

Truly Enlightening

I couldn’t help but admire the main character, Balram. Give this book a read I’m sure you’ll end up learning a lot from him. (:

"I was a driver to a master, but now I'm a master of drivers."

A great book...deserving of its Man Booker Prize. As much as I liked Edward Luce's In Spite of the Gods: The Rise of Modern India, this fictional work is the most vivid and revealing book about India that I've read to date. Author Aravind Adiga comes out of the gate with both guns blazing and never lets up. The book is constructed as a series of dictated reveries addressed to Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao. Adiga's tale speaks of an Indian/Chinese future with the US as a bit player. As early as Page 2, Adiga bares his teeth: "Apparently, sir, you Chinese are far ahead of us in every respect, except you don't have entrepreneurs. And our nation, though it has no drinking water, electricity, sewage system, public transportation, sense of hygiene, discipline, courtesy or punctuality, _does_ have entrepreneurs." From there on in, the author wades in and fires haymakers like that on every page. His pace and urgency never flag. The tone is captured by a single line of English his driver/protagonist quotes early and often: "What a f---ing joke." It's a phrase that is throw out with such aplomb and bitterness by his master's ex-wife that it catches the driver's ear despite his unfamiliarity with the language. I found it very enjoyable to pair this book with a viewing of Danny Boyle's Slumdog Millionaire [Theatrical Release]. Both are rooted in what Adiga calls the Darkness. In Adiga's tale, cynicism wins out and produces a deeply flawed survivor and winner. Boyle's film, by contrast, gives us the triumph of the good and pure in the form of humble chaiwallah, Jamal Malik.

A Sly Look into Modern India

Despite a few flaws (like cartoonish secondary characters), I strongly recommend "The White Tiger" for three reasons: (1) Aravind Adiga skillfully constructs an intriguing, humorous narrative that moves like the wind; (2) he brings us into a foreign world to which most Americans are oblivious; (3) it presents a moral ambiguity that you'll want to discuss long after you're through reading the book.

From The Darkness into the light

What's astonishing about "The White Tiger" isn't Adiga's depiction of the social and economic inequalities of contemporary India. Other writers--Rohinton Mistry in " A Fine Balance," Kiran Desai in "The Inheritance of Loss," among others--have written very good novels about this. What is astonishing is the economy with which he does it. Novels about societal inequities are often lengthy; think of a novel by Dickens or Stowe or Dreiser or Steinbeck, in which the accumulating weight of the details of suffering creates a powerful impression. Adiga creates two disparate worlds, Balram's tiny native village in the Darkness and the sliver of Delhi he inhabits in his life as a driver for the urbanized son of the village landlord. The first is a place of absolute hopelessness presided over by allegorical figures of corrupt wealth: the four landlords known as The Stork, The Buffalo, The Wild Boar, and The Raven. From afar (and occasionally up close) The Great Socialist is re-elected again and again through promises of change (always unkept) and corrupt electioneering. Balram's family, it is clear, will be poor forever. The city, for Balram, consists of the glittery American-style mall (which he can't enter); the air-conditioned Honda that he drives; and the red bag stuffed with cash for politicians with power over The Stork's businesses. These two settings (and the human animals that inhabit them) set out a chasm that is utterly unbridgeable. Thus, when Balram murders his master (a fact established at the very beginning of the novel), it seems less a tragedy than the outcome of impeccable logic. I kept thinking of Dreiser's Sister Carrie, another small town character who migrates to the city. But where Dreiser is intent on portraying Carrie as someone crushed by grinding social forces far beyond her control, Adiga deftly portrays Balram as an entrepreneur, one whose tiger's leap across the chasm is equally the product of social forces he cannot control. This leap leads to a 21st century ascent (in social and economic terms) not a 19th century descent. Note: I've just read that Adiga won the Man Booker prize. I would have hated to have had to choose between a book as fine as this one and two other nominees, Sebastian Barry's "The Secret Scripture" and Philip Hensher's "The Northern Clemency."

Incredible Journey Through A Changing India

A Man-Booker Prize nominated book by Aravind Adiga. They remain slaves because they can't see what is beautiful in this world -The Poet Iqbal, as quoted by Balram, the protagonist of the book. To read this book is to leave with the impression that India is a mess. It is 99% of the 2nd most populous nation on Earth being kept in chains of servitude by themselves. Adiga has written a compelling first novel on the liberation of a man born to be a servant of the rich. It describes the way that Balram, a boy born in the Darkness - small villages away from the coast, is sold into indentured servitude to pay off the dowry debts associated with marrying of a daughter. Balram, told by a school inspector that he is a White Tiger - something born once a generation, rises through sheer ambition to become a driver for a local landlord. Through his cunning, he is brought to Delhi to serve as driver for Ashok - the son of the landlord. As a driver, he begins to understand the relation between master and servant in his culture. The servant is nothing more than a throwaway item to be used and discarded. A pivotal moment of the book occurs when Ashok's wife demands to drive after a wild night out with her husband. On the way home, she hits and kills a young child. No one saw the accident. Yet, to be safe, the landlord's family arranges for Balram to confess to the hit-and-run accident. It is a source of pride for Balram's family - that he would do this for the master! From this point, Balram begins a series of rebellions leading up to the murder of Ashok and the theft of millions of rupees. This is not a vicious murder of a hated landlord. Rather, it is an amoral killing of the system that Ashok represents. It is the death of the old system. Yet the old system did not know it was dying. Balram runs away to the southern coast - to Bangalore, the tech capital - and sets up a taxi system for tech companies with the help of bribery of the police. When one of his drivers accidentally kills someone, he uses his connections in the police to sweep it under the rug. He protects his driver. Yet he insists on going to the family's house, paying his respects, giving them thousands of rupees, and hiring the killed boy's brother. The system is not dead, yet Adiga suggests it is changing as the few servants who free themselves change it from within. This is not what westerners would call a morality story in the Western sense. There is a man willing to kill to get ahead. This is a man held up as honorable. The beauty of Adiga's writing is it opens a window into the culture that lets you root for Balram, hold him as honorable, even as he does dishonorable things. Good read.

Debut novel about India a fantastically dark read

White Tiger by Aravind Adiga is the compelling story of an Indian man trying to break free of societal chains and expectations. Balram Halwai lived in the Darkness, a small village, in India under the thumb of his grandmother and the rules of his culture, until he is hired as the driver for a landlord who brings him into the Light of Delhi. The story is told through a letter Balram is writing to a Chinese official to show him entrepreneurial spirit. Balram is intelligent, which gains him the nickname White Tiger in his home town, but because of his family name and no education, he can expect nothing greater than being a virtual slave to his boss. He has dreams of something, anything different than the life laid out in front of him, but they only begin to take root when his boss changes. As long as his boss is honorable in his actions to Balram, he can accept his lot in life, but when the man starts abusing him and sleeping with prostitutes, Balram sees that he is just as corrupt as the rest of the system and decides to break free, utilizing violence to do so. Despite Balram's deplorable behavior, you can't help but root for him and want him to break the cycle of back-breaking labor and destitute poverty that has followed his family for generations. He's a funny narrator whose descriptions of both monetary and moral poverty alternately make you laugh and cry. Adiga is a fresh voice and a stellar writer.