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Literature / Re: What are you reading today?
« on: January 12, 2010, 08:36:07 PM »
I just finished with The white Tiger by Aravind Adiga, 2008 Booker prize winner.
It is a debut, and one of the most engaging novels I have read in recent time. It knocked my socks off.
Here is a review from Financial Times.
The White Tiger
Review by Adrian Turpin
The White Tiger
By Aravind Adiga
Atlantic Books £12.99, 321 pages
FT bookshop price: £10.39
Literature has a noble tradition of sympathetic psychopaths. Balram Halwai, protagonist of Aravind Adiga’s impressive first novel, demands admittance to their hall of fame.
On the run after committing murder, Balram spends his nights writing to the Chinese premier, who is about to visit India. His intention is to correct misconceptions about his country. But what he offers is no bloodless sociology lesson. Everything worth knowing about the “new” India is in the story of his life, from village teashop boy to Bangalore entrepreneur.
The White Tiger is a book of two Indias. The first is a country of light, the necklace of relatively prosperous cities near the ocean. The second, into which Balram is born, is “the Darkness”, whose presiding deity is the mud of the Ganges in which little flourishes and from which nothing escapes.
Or almost nothing. For, like the white tiger, Balram is a creature that you might meet once in a lifetime. The son of a rickshaw driver, he defies the expectations of his caste to become chauffeur to a corrupt local landlord. From here, it only needs a little blackmail before he finds his way to Delhi, driving his boss’s son.
Adiga’s portrait of the Indian capital is very funny but unmistakably angry. From his master’s Honda, an increasingly unhinged Balram observes a city riven with status anxiety, where every sparkling new mall hides in its hinterland a flea-bitten market for service staff; every bottle of Johnnie Walker has a bootleg counterpart. Above all, it’s a vision of a society of people complicit in their own servitude: to paraphrase Balram, they are roosters guarding the coop, aware they’re for the chop, yet unwilling to escape.
Ultimately, the tiger refuses to stay caged. Balram’s violent bid for freedom is shocking. What, we’re left to ask, does it make him – just another thug in India’s urban jungle or a revolutionary and idealist? It’s a sign of this book’s quality, as well as of its moral seriousness, that it keeps you guessing to the final page and beyond.
.Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009. You may share using our article tools
It is a debut, and one of the most engaging novels I have read in recent time. It knocked my socks off.
Here is a review from Financial Times.
The White Tiger
Review by Adrian Turpin
The White Tiger
By Aravind Adiga
Atlantic Books £12.99, 321 pages
FT bookshop price: £10.39
Literature has a noble tradition of sympathetic psychopaths. Balram Halwai, protagonist of Aravind Adiga’s impressive first novel, demands admittance to their hall of fame.
On the run after committing murder, Balram spends his nights writing to the Chinese premier, who is about to visit India. His intention is to correct misconceptions about his country. But what he offers is no bloodless sociology lesson. Everything worth knowing about the “new” India is in the story of his life, from village teashop boy to Bangalore entrepreneur.
The White Tiger is a book of two Indias. The first is a country of light, the necklace of relatively prosperous cities near the ocean. The second, into which Balram is born, is “the Darkness”, whose presiding deity is the mud of the Ganges in which little flourishes and from which nothing escapes.
Or almost nothing. For, like the white tiger, Balram is a creature that you might meet once in a lifetime. The son of a rickshaw driver, he defies the expectations of his caste to become chauffeur to a corrupt local landlord. From here, it only needs a little blackmail before he finds his way to Delhi, driving his boss’s son.
Adiga’s portrait of the Indian capital is very funny but unmistakably angry. From his master’s Honda, an increasingly unhinged Balram observes a city riven with status anxiety, where every sparkling new mall hides in its hinterland a flea-bitten market for service staff; every bottle of Johnnie Walker has a bootleg counterpart. Above all, it’s a vision of a society of people complicit in their own servitude: to paraphrase Balram, they are roosters guarding the coop, aware they’re for the chop, yet unwilling to escape.
Ultimately, the tiger refuses to stay caged. Balram’s violent bid for freedom is shocking. What, we’re left to ask, does it make him – just another thug in India’s urban jungle or a revolutionary and idealist? It’s a sign of this book’s quality, as well as of its moral seriousness, that it keeps you guessing to the final page and beyond.
.Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009. You may share using our article tools