Title: The White Tiger [book club selection, VM]Author: Aravind Adiga
Read: NYC
Format: Kindle
White Tiger is a gripping, darkly-comic view into modern India told - with gusto - by Balram Halwai, our entrepeneurial, car-service-owning narrator. Ostensibly, the story is about Balram's rise as a businessman, but through his tale we are exposed to the grave disparity among Indians even today. Some of the dualities explored include: Hindu vs Muslim cultures; abject poverty vs burgeoning global power; the urban vs the rural; individual vs familial responsibilities; obedience vs corruption; and western assimilation vs national loyalty.
Clearly, White Tiger is dense with meaning, but it falls shy of actually indicting any one villain for these problems, which is refreshing. Instead, it paints the perhaps heavy-handed portrait of a changing nation.
Told as a missive from the charming, if mentally-unbalanced, Balram to the Prime Minister of China, the novel is at times as funny as it is wrenching. The epistolary structure (if you can call it that, at this length) serves as a great mechanism for Adiga to pull out of some of the more heartbreaking/shocking assessments of India by injecting Balram's humorous voice. Adiga also then returns the reader to the absurd format of an earnest letter from a ridiculous man to a world leader.
Anyway, I liked The White Tiger. I liked the narrator (sociopath or not). I was intrigued by the portrait of India. But, it did leave me (and my fellow book-clubbers) wondering about how exaggerated the account is. But maybe that's part of the point? That is, this depravity (or some degree of it anyway) exists and nobody really knows (or cares to know) exactly how bad it might be.
Provoking and funny. An unusual combination worth checking out.
4 out of 5 stars
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