The White Tiger

by Aravind Adiga

book data

5,035 ratings, 3.79 average rating, 1,404 reviews (more data...)

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5		20%
4		46%
3		25%
2		6%
1		1%

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published

February 10th 2009 (first published 2008) by Free Press

binding

Paperback, 288 pages

characters

Balram Halwai

setting

India

literary awards

Man Booker Prize 2008; Galaxy British Book Awards Author of the Year; PEN/Robert Bingham Fellowship for Writers 2009 Finalist

isbn

1416562605 (isbn13: 9781416562603)

description

Introducing a major literary talent, The White Tiger offers a story of coruscating wit, blistering suspense, and questionable morality, told by the mo...more

[close] 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.

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05/06/08

Mark rated it:

(review of isbn 1416562591)

bookshelves: fiction

Read in December, 2008

Balram Halwai grew up in the Darkness -- the immense swath of rural India where the poor vastly outnumber the rich and where the right of the rich to oppress the poor is rarely questioned.

By dint of his intelligence and ambition, he becomes the No. 2 driver to a local landlord nicknamed The Stork, and when he discovers the No. 1 driver has been hiding a secret, is able to displace him and eventually move to Delhi with the landlord's Westernized son, Mr. Ashok, and his modern wife, Pi...more Balram Halwai grew up in the Darkness -- the immense swath of rural India where the poor vastly outnumber the rich and where the right of the rich to oppress the poor is rarely questioned.

By dint of his intelligence and ambition, he becomes the No. 2 driver to a local landlord nicknamed The Stork, and when he discovers the No. 1 driver has been hiding a secret, is able to displace him and eventually move to Delhi with the landlord's Westernized son, Mr. Ashok, and his modern wife, Pinky Madam.

Quite early in this debut novel, Balram -- writing a long letter to Chinese premier Wen Jiabao, who is about to visit India -- confesses that he has murdered Mr. Ashok, a crime that enabled him to move to Bangalore and set himself up as an entrepreneur.

The flashback journey he relates in his letter describes how he came to that point, and in the process, it lays out a sardonic, seriocomic saga of the plight of India's poor. At one point, Balram tries to explain why the poor don't rise up to overwhelm their masters, and the best metaphor he can come up with is the chicken market in old Delhi, where live roosters sit powerless in cages beneath the carcasses of their freshly slaughtered brothers. He writes:

"Every day, on the roads of Delhi, some chauffeur is driving an empty car with a black suitcase sitting on the backseat. Inside that suitcase is a million, two million rupees; more money than that chauffeur will see in his lifetime. If he took the money he could go to America, Australia, anywhere, and start a new life. He could go inside the five-star hotels he has dreamed about all his life and only seen from the outside. He could take his family to Goa, to England. Yet he takes that black suitacase where his master wants. He puts it down where he is meant to, and never touches a rupee. Why?

"Because Indians are the world's most honest people, like the prime minister's booklet will inform you? No. It's because 99.9 percent of us are caught in the Rooster Coop just like those poor guys in the poultry market."

This novel won the Booker Prize this year, sparked outrage among many in India, but more than anything else, it tells an entertaining tale with the strong, distinctive voice of a man whose soul has had to move from servitude to independence, and who, despite his horrific deed, finds the freedom to live by his own standard of decency.(less)

Like this review? yes (15 people liked it)

9 comments

12/11/08

Jwala rated it:

(review of isbn 1416562591)

Well the stories of murderers and psychopaths are generally like cakes to most of us(and i am no exception). I either love such protagonists or hate them whole-heartedly. Coming to Balaram, the situation is different. I had never felt anything for him even after reading 300 pages. I didn’t even hate him and I was completely indifferent towards him mainly because I felt that his character is artificial and inconsistent.
Every time I read a cynical work or a satire I feel that I have becom...more

Like this review? yes (10 people liked it)

2 comments

03/23/08

Jeff rated it:

(review of isbn 1416562591)

Read in March, 2008

recommends it for: people who enjoyed Hamid's "The Reluctant Fundamentalist" and Pears' "The Portrait"

A stunning first person narrative about a self-proclaimed murderer and entrepreneur. Balram Halwai, the complex narrator of the book, describes, in an obsessive, single-focued, unapologetic letter, his journey out of poverty from the Indian Darkness. It is a story about ambition, corruption, and power -- an amazing story about how one person in a country of servitude escapes his own station to become a man. Is he a visionary? Is he an iconoclast? Is he an amoral monster? The reader goes on a ver...more

Like this review? yes (11 people liked it)

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03/03/09

Paul rated it:

(review of isbn 1416562591)

bookshelves: india, novels

Read in April, 2009

The perfect companion piece to Slumdog Millionaire, and if you didn't like that movie, you won't like this book for the same reasons. It's a no-nonsense bulldozing mordant splenetic jackhammer of a story written as a tough slangy 300 page fast-reading monologue. It's a novel of information, not art. It tells you all about modern India with a traditional rags-to-riches fable. Our hero murders his employer unapologetically, and that's how he gets his riches. This is not rocket science. This is sma...more The perfect companion piece to Slumdog Millionaire, and if you didn't like that movie, you won't like this book for the same reasons. It's a no-nonsense bulldozing mordant splenetic jackhammer of a story written as a tough slangy 300 page fast-reading monologue. It's a novel of information, not art. It tells you all about modern India with a traditional rags-to-riches fable. Our hero murders his employer unapologetically, and that's how he gets his riches. This is not rocket science. This is smashing a guy over the head with a broken bottle of Johnny Walker.
But 90% of the book is not really the story, it's an anguished howl of rage about a distance of eighteen inches. In India, and indeed in other places too, the Rich and the Poor inhabit different universes. But the rich hire some of the poor as servants. This novel is the story of a servant who was a driver. In the car, the driver is separated from his employer (the word used here is Master) by the short distance of 18 inches. But economically, psychologically, medically, it's really 400 light years, as we know. And yet, every day, there they are, cheek by jowl, 18 inches apart, the one regarding the other with irritated amusement or annoyance or contempt, depending on mood, and being reciprocated with fawning fear and even awe. Our hero Balram is the rare beast (white tiger) who does not succumb to this fear and awe. But it's a struggle, and I was glad to be along for the ride.

In the London Review of Books, Sanjay Subrahmanyam almost trashes The White Tiger. His main beef is the language of the novel :

"What of Balram Halwai? What does he sound like? Despite the odd namaste, daal, paan and ghat, his vocabulary is not sprinkled with North Indian vernacular terms. His sentences are mostly short and crudely constructed, apparently a reflection of the fact that we’re dealing with a member of the ‘subaltern’ classes. He doesn’t engage in Rushdian word-play. But he does use a series of expressions that simply don’t add up. He describes his office as a ‘hole in the wall’. He refers to ‘kissing some god’s arse’, an idiomatic expression that doesn’t exist in any North Indian language. ‘Half-formed ideas bugger one another, and make more half-formed ideas’ and the Chinese prime minister is advised never to ‘let that blasphemous idea into your yellow skull’. On another matter, he sneers: ‘They’re so yesterday.’ A clever little phrase appears: ‘A statutory warning – as they say on cigarette packs – before we begin.’ Dogs are referred to as ‘mutts’. Yet whose vocabulary and whose expressions are these? On page after page, one is brought up short by the jangling dissonance of the language and the falsity of the expressions. This is a posh English-educated voice trying to talk dirty, without being able to pull it off. This is not Salinger speaking as Holden Caulfield, or Joyce speaking as Molly Bloom. It is certainly not Ralph Ellison or James Baldwin, whom Adiga has claimed as his models in speaking for the underdog. What we are dealing with is someone with no sense of the texture of Indian vernaculars, yet claiming to have produced a realistic text."

and then devastatingly:

"The paradox is that for many of this novel’s readers, this lack of verisimilitude will not matter because for them India is and will remain an exotic place. This book adds another brick to the patronising edifice it wants to tear down."

He's right, it didn't matter to me that a guy who doesn't speak English is represented as using hundreds of idiomatic English phrases. But for me that problem is the same as the one posed by the question "how can this first person narrator remember conversations in detail which happened years ago and anyway, who the hell is she talking to?" - i.e. it's a device, we suspend our disbelief, we do it all the time : every time we watch a movie we could be asking ourselves (but don't) "whose point of view is this all from?". Who gathered all those documents together to form the text known as the novel "Dracula"? Well, no one, because Bram Stoker made it all up. How could Clarissa have found the time to write all those long, long letters in "Clarissa"? And so on. (note : Subrahmanyam was the only really dissident voice I found regarding The White Tiger so I thought his argument was worth considering.)

Postscript

The White Tiger is the 9th Booker Prize Winner I've read and redresses the balance between the Splendid (this one, Midnight's Children, Remains of the Day and Sacred Hunger) and the What Were They Thinking (Life & Times of Michael K, Hotel Du Lac, Possession, Life of Pi and especially, remarkably, horrendously, Vernon God Little).(less)

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10 comments

01/10/09

Boof rated it:

(review of isbn 1416562591)

bookshelves: india, my-most-amazing-books, read-in-2009

Read in February, 2009

recommended to Boof by: Christmas present

I have just this minute finished this book and I can already tell that it will be one of those books that I will think about often. It's not a book whose plot I can easily explain, or a book that I can easily fit into a particular genre on my shelves, but my God did it pack a powerful punch. I have hardly been able to put it down between sittings.

The books is narrated via a letter from Balram Halwai, a slum-dweller-turned-driver-turned-murderer-turned-entrepreneur, to the Chinese Pre...more

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05/22/08

Rupert rated it:

(review of isbn 1416562591)

Best contemporary novel I've read this year. Antidote for the pastel lyricism of most mainstream novels coming out of India and a wonderful social satire with savage bit. Kind of like Terry Southern's best work if he hadn't been all weeded up and goofy.
An image from it that sticks with me is how Ghandi's image gets appropriated by the current Indian bureaucracy. Whenever the narrator encounters the hanging Ghandi portrait he sees it as a symbol of "bribes work here, corruptio...more

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05/30/08

Cynthia rated it:

(review of isbn 1416562591)

Read in May, 2008

This is the kind of book that many people try to write and few succeed at. The White Tiger is an awesome book and anyone who is even remotely interested in India will enjoy it. The author is a former Time magazine writer and the first great thing he accomplishes is painting an effortless picture of modern India, from its poorest slums to the wealthier areas where more Westernized Indians make a living doing computer and telephone work for American companies (and then go spend their salaries at ...more

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12/08/08

Anthony rated it:

(review of isbn 1416562591)

bookshelves: currently-reading

Read in January, 2009

I was travelling one evening by train from Yeovil Junction in Somerset to Woking in Surrey and noticed that one of the passengers, a woman with long beautiful curly hair, was buried in 'The White Tiger'. On English trains you have a corridor opposite the toilets, also used for storing bicyles on the journey, where there are also two or three collapsible and uncomfortable seats. It is rather noisy but this was where the girl with curly hair was sitting and for the two hours of the journey she bar...more

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09/09/08

Brad rated it:

bookshelves: booker-prize

Read in April, 2009

Aravind Adiga claims Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man as the forebear of his Booker Prize Winning novel The White Tiger. I wish I could speak to that relationship (I really must get around to reading Ellison), but there was another relationship I found that was important to me: Balram Halwai (aka "The White Tiger," aka "Munna," aka "Country-Mouse," aka Ashok Sharma) and Dostoevsky's Raskolnikov.

Balram is a sort of anti-Raskolnikov.

Their story i...more Aravind Adiga claims Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man as the forebear of his Booker Prize Winning novel The White Tiger. I wish I could speak to that relationship (I really must get around to reading Ellison), but there was another relationship I found that was important to me: Balram Halwai (aka "The White Tiger," aka "Munna," aka "Country-Mouse," aka Ashok Sharma) and Dostoevsky's Raskolnikov.

Balram is a sort of anti-Raskolnikov.

Their story is much the same but there is one key difference: Balram doesn't let "foolish" guilt overwhelm him. The fiery Indian man has a strength of spirit that the paranoid Russian lacks, and it makes him likable in spite of his actions.

But then, Raskolnikov's weakness always made me cringe. His act of murder was nasty, yes, but it wasn't without justification, and once he committed the murder I wanted him to live up to the ideals he used to justify his act. He failed himself and paid the price, and he disappointed me in the bargain.

Balram doesn't fall prey to the same weakness (although it is interesting to note that the novel is epistolary, unfolding in a series of letters over seven nights, so perhaps there is an underlying weakness that still catches him out beyond the confines of the novel), and he uses the murder and the money he steals to better his life and finally feel like "a man" in a world where caste enslaves more than half of its starving population.

If Raskolnikov's crimes were somewhat justified, Balram's are much more so, but they also have greater consequences. Balram's crimes bleed into areas that Raskolnikov's don't. Balram's attack with the jagged neck of a Johnny Walker Black bottle doesn't just kill his "master," it effectively kills his entire family.

The wonder of Adiga's book, however, is that it leaves us, or at least it left me, entirely okay with Balram's actions.

The man did what he had to do. He did what the rich do everyday. And he became one of them. He rose up. He made it.

And that's the American Dream isn't it? The American dream in Bangalor. Praise be to free enterprise.(less)

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01/02/09

Ewurama rated it:

Read in December, 2008

The White Tiger is a lightning-fast read (and winner of the 2008 Man Booker Prize for Fiction), which I easily finished in under a week. The reader knows up front that the main character and narrator, Balram Halwai, went from being a poor village boy to becoming a successful entrepreneur and also, somewhere in the middle of it all, a murderer—but is left to discover the how and why over the course of the book.

Balram uses the metaphor of the rooster coop to explain Indian society. ...more

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12/30/08

Map rated it:

(review of isbn 1416562591)

Read in January, 2009

A darkly realistic view of modern India narrated by a moral, philosophical, yet coldly pragmatic man. I see Balram, the protagonist and narrator, as more of a metaphor; the murder he commits is one of necessity that propels change for the slice of India he represents. While he becomes more like that whom he kills, he still retains a level of decency that offers hope for change.

Everyone talks about the 21st century being the rise of India and China. But neither of those nations can t...more

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12/17/08

Joe rated it:

(review of isbn 1416562591)

My favorite section of this gripping little book is when our young hero is fleeing from a pimp and ends up in a well-known book market in the old part of the city. He compares the intellectual arousal to that of a brothel--from which he has just fled--and explains how the "brain hums" when one is around books, especially a lot of books. This feeling is kin to anyone who finds him/herself magnetically drawn into second-hand bookstores or even the big black and green giants like Border...more My favorite section of this gripping little book is when our young hero is fleeing from a pimp and ends up in a well-known book market in the old part of the city. He compares the intellectual arousal to that of a brothel--from which he has just fled--and explains how the "brain hums" when one is around books, especially a lot of books. This feeling is kin to anyone who finds him/herself magnetically drawn into second-hand bookstores or even the big black and green giants like Borders or Barnes & Noble. A daze settles on the mind, a kind of awestruck trance. Books appear and reappear in this story, and the protagonist, a young man from a slum of a village who makes good as a personal chauffer for corrupt and nasty businessman in Delhi, senses that somehow books should be in his life, but he doesn't read, and his only literary reference are two four Muslim poets, of whose names he can remember only three.
The book harps on the same point repeatedly: The India of Darkness and the India of Light. The slum, the plumbing that rivals ancient rome, the stench, the poverty, that is the Darkness. The Light shines its beams on tech companies, skyscrapers, masters with personal chauffers and the rest of the new India everyone has been praising for quite some time now. The NYTimes review pigeonholed this book as nothing more than literary "social commentary." But I see it as a stern rebuke to those ever-ready individuals who applaud emerging India, prophesying its superpower future and undeniable place in the forefront of global affairs. What we see here is a deeply split society, a gaping void between the rich and the poor, hostility towards Indian Muslims, and a constant kind of stink. Like Dickens, the India of "White Tiger" is full of dirt and grime. It smells.
The story is written in a letter to the Premier of China, who the hero has heard is visiting India in a few days. Dismissed as a gimmick or device by critics, this setup deserves more attention. It is of no small coincidence that a book about the lie that is modern India should have its story directed at a country that lives a similar lie. This book is a thinly vieled jab at "Chindia," the idea that somehow these deeply flawed countries will splendidly rule the world.
Another one of the book's merits is its similarities with other first-person narratives of note. I felt the influence of the frustrated and insightful Holden Caufield and the wily but senstive Huck at play constantly, which may have been in the minds of those who gave the book its presitigious prize and placed it, rightfully in my opinion, in the company of other tales that won't leave us alone.(less)

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11/29/08

Kohl Gill rated it:

(review of isbn 1416562591)

Read in January, 2009

recommended to Kohl by: Allison Coleman, Augustin Maria
recommends it for: Folks looking for a light read about modern India

The scenes of Delhi, especially of poverty and corruption in Delhi, got me a lot more nostalgic than I had expected. The narrator lives in his own head, so grand pronouncements run through the text; I've quoted a few here from the beginning of the book. I agree with various reviews I've read that Adiga is a bit free with this character trait, and that it distracts quite a bit as unrealistic in the context of the novel. But it still hangs together nicely.

Of course, I've never grown...more The scenes of Delhi, especially of poverty and corruption in Delhi, got me a lot more nostalgic than I had expected. The narrator lives in his own head, so grand pronouncements run through the text; I've quoted a few here from the beginning of the book. I agree with various reviews I've read that Adiga is a bit free with this character trait, and that it distracts quite a bit as unrealistic in the context of the novel. But it still hangs together nicely.

Of course, I've never grown up poor in the Darkness, so what do I know?

"The story of a poor man's life is written on his body, in a sharp pen."

"Neither you nor I speak English, but there are some things that can be said only in English."

"Me, and thousands of others in this country like me, are half-baked, because we were never allowed to complete our schooling. Open our skulls, look in with a penlight, and you'll find an odd museum of ideas: sentences of history or mathematics remembered from school textbooks (no boy remembers his schooling like the one who was taken out of school, let me assure you), sentences about politics read in a newspaper while waiting for someone to come to an office, triangles and pyramids seen on the torn pages of the old geometry textbooks which every tea shop in this country uses to wrap its snacks in, bits of All India Radio news bulletins, things that drop into your mind, like lizards from the ceiling, in the half hour before falling asleep--all these ideas, half formed and half digested and half correct, mix up with other half-cooked ideas in your head, and I guess these half-formed ideas bugger one another, and make more half-formed ideas, and this is what you act on and live with."

"Apparently, sir you Chinese are far ahead of us in every respect, except that 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. Thousands and thousands of them. Especially in the field of technology. And these entrepreneurs—’’we’’ entrepreneurs—have set up all these outsourcing companies that virtually run America now."(less)

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08/18/08

Nancy rated it:

(review of isbn 1416562591)

bookshelves: booker-prize-longlist, fiction---india

Read in September, 2008

Another fine entry on the Booker Prize longlist for 2008, and I must say, this is the first year that I've been reading the longlist where I've really enjoyed every book I've read. With only three more of these books to go I'm simply amazed at how well the judges chose this year. What's even more amazing is that White Tiger is Adiga's first novel. He will definitely be on my list of authors to watch in the future.

At some point the main character Balram Halwai recounts a story ab...more

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06/20/08

Jeffrey rated it:

(review of isbn 1416562591)

bookshelves: literature, read-in-2008

Read in June, 2008

recommends it for: People who like to learn about the world

A really fascinating look at the underbelly of Indian culture from the viewpoint of a driver of a rich landlord -- industrialist in India. The White Tiger, a poor boy who without any formal education becomes a wealthy man recounts his path to wealth in a series of letters to the Chinese Premier who is visiting India. (Personally this style fo the story made little sense but the story told was fresh and interesting and informative). Update -- this novel just won the Man-Booker Prize as the bes...more

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11/12/08

Spudsie rated it:

Read in November, 2008

recommends it for: Man Booker readers

Ehhhh...it was okay.

Well, it was probably better than okay. Since it won the Man Booker prize my expectations were pretty high. And while the story kept my attention, I wasn't completely "sold" on some of the decisions and actions of the main character. They didn't ring true.

I really enjoyed the letter-style of the book. I certainly don't regret spending the time reading it.

I suppose I just expected something more.

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01/03/09

CR rated it:

bookshelves: modern-lit

Read in January, 2009

An interesting read - and a perspective on India I'm glad to have, really. Addressing the caste system, corruption, greed, money, all the despotic things humans have created.

Makes you angry, but the voice of the protagonist is ironic enough that you can't help but chuckle outloud.

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01/16/09

Janekendrick rated it:

(review of isbn 1416562591)

An engaging,original style can often portray harsh realities realistically and convincingly. After reading this brilliant book, I now know that I will never travel to India

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12/23/08

Will rated it:

(review of isbn 1416562591)

Read in December, 2008

This is a dark, biting, unsubtle look at 21st Century India, stuck in the mire of a corrupt, cynical past, and debauching and slaughtering its way into a corrupt and cynical future, told by a working class fellow who, through ambition, intelligence, and a willingness to be utterly ruthless is clawing his way up the rungs of the Indian class ladder. It paints a bleak picture, offering little optimism for an India that will be any cleaner, fairer or more humane than the India it is replacing.
...more

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12/22/08

Faizah Roslaini rated it:

bookshelves: read-2009

Read in February, 2009

It's amazing how satisfying this little book is for me, literally speaking. I was discouraged at the beginning because frankly the letter-writing style did not appeal much to my taste as it gave the impression that the whole reading would be 'quiet' (like Robin put it in one of her reviews). However as the reading progressed I was so mesmerized in it that my distaste was entirely forgotten. The writer did a really good job telling a story.

Balram tells a tale of rotten, backstreet In...more