The White Tiger
by Aravind Adiga
The surprise winner of the 2008 Man Booker Prize is first-time novelist, Aravind Adiga.
At 33 he is the one of the youngest writers to win and also the fourth Indian-born winner, along with Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy and Kiran Desai.
He was born in Madras in 1974, raised partly in Australia, and now lives in Mumbai. A journalist, he was educated at the universities of Oxford and Columbia.
The White Tiger takes the form of seven letters written by a Bangalore businessman, Balram Halwai to Wen Jiabao, the Chinese Prime Minister. He wants to describe his country to Wen Jiabao who is soon to visit India.
Balram, the ‘white tiger’ of the title, is both antihero and a most entertaining narrator. Born the son of an impoverished rural rickshaw driver, by lying, betraying and using his sharp intelligence he claws his way from poverty to the heights of entrepreneurial success.
The book is a compelling story of modern India, an “India of Light and an India of Darkness”. In Balram’s own words “in the old days there were 1,000 castes in India. These days, there are just two castes: Men with Big Bellies, and Men with Small Bellies”.
Although Balram is a thoroughly unpleasant villain, it is impossible not to feel sympathy with him. He tells his story with wit and a sardonic humour.
Selecting a winner this year was a difficult task for the Man Booker judges, and The White Tiger was not a unanimous choice. Michael Portillo, chair of the judges, said that “here was a book on the cutting edge, dealing with a different aspect of India. What set it apart was its originality. The feeling was that this was new territory”.
I enjoyed this novel immensely; it’s a real page-turner, a book to read in one session. Adiga has a most original voice and brilliantly paints this unforgettable story.
This review was written by Julie Best from Acquisitions and Cataloguing at Hawthorn Library
