The White Tiger: A Novel (Man Booker Prize)

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Product Description
Introducing a major literary talent, The White Tiger offers a story of coruscating wit, blistering suspense, and questionable morality, told by the most volatile, captivating, and utterly inimitable narrator that this millennium has yet seen.

Balram Halwai is a complicated man. Servant. Philosopher. Entrepreneur. Murderer. Over the course of seven nights, by the scattered light of a preposterous chandelier, Balram tells us the terrible and transfixing story of how he came to be a success in life -- having nothing but his own wits to help him along.

Born in the dark heart of India, Balram gets a break when he is hired as a driver for his village's wealthiest man, two house Pomeranians (Puddles and Cuddles), and the rich man's (very unlucky) son. From behind the wheel of their Honda City car, Balram's new world is a revelation. While his peers flip through the pages of Murder Weekly ("Love -- Rape -- Revenge!"), barter for girls, drink liquor (Thunderbolt), and perpetuate the Great Rooster Coop of Indian society, Balram watches his employers bribe foreign ministers for tax breaks, barter for girls, drink liquor (single-malt whiskey), and play their own role in the Rooster Coop. Balram learns how to siphon gas, deal with corrupt mechanics, and refill and resell Johnnie Walker Black Label bottles (all but one). He also finds a way out of the Coop that no one else inside it can perceive.

Balram's eyes penetrate India as few outsiders can: the cockroaches and the call centers; the prostitutes and the worshippers; the ancient and Internet cultures; the water buffalo and, trapped in so many kinds of cages that escape is (almost) impossible, the white tiger. And with a charisma as undeniable as it is unexpected, Balram teaches us that religion doesn't create virtue, and money doesn't solve every problem -- but decency can still be found in a corrupt world, and you can get what you want out of life if you eavesdrop on the right conversations.

Sold in sixteen countries around the world, The White Tiger recalls The Death of Vishnu and Bangkok 8 in ambition, scope, and narrative genius, with a mischief and personality all its own. Amoral, irreverent, deeply endearing, and utterly contemporary, this novel is an international publishing sensation -- and a startling, provocative debut.

Customer Reviews: Read 105 more reviews...

4 out of 5 stars

Caught in the rooster coop May 27, 2008
97 out of 102 found this review helpful

In his debut novel, Aravind Adiga takes on some hefty issues: the unhappy division of social classes into haves and have-nots, the cultural imperialism of the First World, the powder-kegged anger that seethes among the world's dispossessed, and entrapment. But his skills as an author protect the novel from becoming one of those horrible didactic stories in which characters and plot are little more than mouthpieces and vehicle for delivering Great Truths. The White Tiger entertains and gives pause for thought. This is a good combination.

The plot centers around Balram Halwai, a laborer born and raised in a small village utterly controlled by crooked and feudally powerful landlords. The village is located in 'the Darkness,' a particularly backward region of India. Balram is eventually taken to Delhi as a driver for one of the landlord's westernized sons, Ashok. It's in Delhi that Balram comes to the realization that there's a new caste system at work in both India and the world, and it has only two groups: those who are eaten, and those who eat, prey and predators. Balram decides he wants to be an eater, someone with a big belly, and the novel tracks the way in which this ambition plays out.

A key metaphor in the novel is the rooster coop. Balram recognizes that those who are eaten are trapped inside a small and closed cage--the rooster coop--that limits their opportunities. Even worse, they begin to internalize the limitations and indignities of the coop, so that after awhile they're unable to imagine they deserve any other world than the cramped one in which they exist. Balram's dream is to break free of his coop, to shed his feathers and become what for him is a symbol of individualism, power, and freedom: a white tiger. But as he discovers, white tigers have their own cages, too.

Of course, it's not simply the Balram's of the world caught in the rooster coop. Adiga's point seems to be that even the world's most privileged suffer from a cultural and class myopia that limits perspective and distorts self-understanding. The White Tiger is a good tonic with which to clear one's vision and spread one's wings.

5 out of 5 stars

From The Darkness into the light October 13, 2008
63 out of 69 found this review helpful

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."

5 out of 5 stars

Debut novel about India a fantastically dark read May 2, 2008
33 out of 40 found this review helpful

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.

5 out of 5 stars

Incredible Journey Through A Changing India September 6, 2008
19 out of 20 found this review helpful

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.

5 out of 5 stars

A Voice Like Dave Eggers May 30, 2008
17 out of 22 found this review helpful

Great fiction writing is like acting and directing at the same time. The novelist needs to create believable personalities, original voices, and plot. The character that Adiga created here, Balram the servant cum businessman, speaks in an original voice that sounds lyrical, devilish, believable.

On the surface, the novel is a 250+ page letter from Balram to a visiting Chinese diplomat. On the micro-level of words and sentences, Adiga comes up with original character development that convinces the reader we have blood and flesh. Yet it's fiction. The story is a study in character, and character development seems to be Adiga's main strength. The story's plot and setting rests on Adiga's firm background as a journalist covering India for Time magazine. Adiga is familiar with both the poor and new India, and in the novel he contrasts the two societies to great effect. In the end, it's the conflict between these two societies that is the crux of the story: "Dark" and "Light" India are constantly at war, yet the two extremes also seem to share certain values. In the novel, both the rich and the poor are corrupt, resort to bribery, sleep with prostitutes, cheat, lie, steal -- and even murder -- to get to the top. In the end, this comparing and contrasting of values is what this book is about.

As an aid to character development, Adiga gives animal nicknames to the rich landlords that serve as supporting characters. Given that the poor in India tend to be illiterate and relate to people and things according to their environment more than through academic means, animal nicknames seemed like an ingenious character development ploy. The novel is filled with little elements like this that work well.

At the end of the novel (after Balram kills his master and becomes the narrating entrepreneur of the story) the plot tends to wrap up rather quickly (I will not give it away here); however, although it wraps up quickly, it is a satisfying ending because it completes the theme of the book, which is the contrast and similarities in values between the rich and poor in India.

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