The White Tiger

by Aravind Adiga | Literature & Fiction |
ISBN: 9781843547204 Global Overview for this book
Registered by KT-J on 12/29/2008
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2 journalers for this copy...
Journal Entry 1 by KT-J on Monday, December 29, 2008
I received this as a Christmas present from my Auntie and Uncle. This book won the Man Booker Prize 2008 and is set in India.

Journal Entry 2 by KT-J at Bury, Greater Manchester United Kingdom on Wednesday, February 17, 2021
Finally got round to reading this last year!

Blurb from the cover:
Meet Balram Halwai, the 'White Tiger': servant, philosopher, entrepreneur, murderer. Over the course of seven nights, by the scattered light of a preposterous chandelier, Balram tells his story...

Born in a village in the dark heart of India, the son of a rickshaw puller, Balram is taken out of school by his family and put to work in a teashop. As he crushes coal and wipes tables, he nurses a dream of escape - of breaking away from the banks of Mother Ganga, into whose murky depths have seeped the remains of a hundred generations.

His big chance comes when a rich village landlord hires him as a chauffeur for his son, daughter-in-law, and their two Pomeranian dogs. From behind the wheel of a Honda, Balram first sees Delhi. The city is a revelation. Amid the cockroaches and call-centres, the 36,000,004 gods, the slums, the shopping malls and the crippling traffic jams, Balram's re-education begins. Caught between his instinct to be a loyal son and servant, and his desire to better himself, he learns of a new morality at the heart of a new India. As the other servants flick through the pages of Murder Weekly, Balram begins to see how the Tiger might escape his cage. For surely any successful man must spill a little blood on his way to the top?

I enjoyed this book. When it came out I remember a few people at bookclub saying it wasn't worth the hype, especially as a Man Booker Prize winner, but I enjoyed the writing and construction of the story through letters looking back at the narrator's journey.

While the story highlights the struggles of the lower classes/castes to escape their poverty in an increasingly globalised and polarised India, it is told with a lot of dark humour and without any sense of sentimentality. Well worth the read.

Journal Entry 3 by stubee at Bury, Greater Manchester United Kingdom on Wednesday, February 17, 2021
I read this back in January and really enjoyed it.

It is written as a series of communications from a “Business Man” to the Chinese Premier who is due to visit India which I though was an interesting way of telling the tale.

But most importantly I could imagine being there as it took me back to my (very brief) time in India when I worked for a week in Gurugram (which is the setting for the majority of the novel although named Gurgaon by Adiga in the book). I just just visualize the place and imagine everything in the story going on around me.

All in all a very good novel which I'd recommend to anyone.

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