From: bonnymiler25@gmail.com   
      
   English-language Asian writers have adopted all manner of styles in the last   
   three decades -- Raj nostalgia, magic realism, Zola-like fatalism ?- in their   
   attempts to encapsulate India. What makes this much trumpeted debut novel by   
   Aravind Adiga such a    
   triumph is the strikingly contemporary voice with which it skewers its   
   subject: a beguiling mix of pitch-black humor and devastating cynicism that   
   feels both refreshingly modern and bracingly direct. As India rushes with   
   careless abandon towards its    
   longed-for status as an economic superpower, and as the gap between rich and   
   poor grows ever wider, the country has found in Adiga an acerbic commentator   
   more than capable of chronicling its often grotesque inequalities.Adiga's   
   novel is, in essence, a    
   confession, a series of seven letters written over seven nights by a   
   "self-taught entrepreneur" called Balram Halwai, the white tiger of the title.   
   The confession Balram wishes to make is both personal and general. Addressing   
   himself with comic    
   bumptiousness to Chinese premier Wen Jiabao, who he has learned is coming on a   
   fact-finding mission to Bangalore, this once cowed and unworldly servant wants   
   to show the august foreign dignitary the true entrepreneurial spirit of the   
   country. To do so,    
   he offers, with barely a flicker of self-doubt or self-knowledge, his own life   
   as shining example. "When you have heard the story of how I got to Bangalore   
   and became one of its most successful (though probably least known)   
   businessmen," Balram crows, "   
   you will know everything there is to know about how entrepreneurship is born,   
   nurtured, and developed in this, the glorious twenty-first century of man."   
   But what starts as comic bravado rapidly and dramatically darkens, as Balram   
   reveals both the    
   cloacal depths from which he has clambered and the sometimes shocking lengths   
   to which he has gone (including the grisly murder of his master, Mr. Ashok) in   
   his struggle to reach the slippery summit of the dung heap. Irony, paradox,   
   and anger run like a    
   poison through every page of Balram's commentary. Taking us back to his   
   birthplace, Balram gleefully reveals it not as the "village paradise" of   
   Indian lore but as a squalid, impoverished habitation where families of pigs   
   feast on feces in the street,    
   and families of humans sleep like animals in the houses, their legs "falling   
   one over the other, like one creature, a millipede." He introduces us to his   
   supposedly idyllic family (dead, like his mother; soon to die, like his poor,   
   rickshaw-pulling    
   father; or graspingly greedy, like his succubus of a grandmother), takes us to   
   his shambles of a school -- "a paradise within a paradise," he hisses   
   sarcastically -- and to the local hospital, where nothing but goats roam the   
   corridors. He acquaints us,    
   too, with the local landlords, rapacious creatures with names like the Raven,   
   the Wild Boar, and the Buffalo, who live behind high-walled mansions and have   
   "fed on the village, and everything that grew in it, until there was nothing   
   left for anyone else    
   to feed on." Rather than encouraging freedom and "enterprise," everything in   
   this system -- landlords, family, education, politics -- seems designed   
   specifically to suppress them (the ironic parallels with China are   
   intentional). But Balram, by sheer    
   dint of wily persistence, escapes the suffocating clutch of "the Darkness" and   
   finds himself, eventually, in "the light" in Delhi, acting as chauffeur to Mr.   
   Ashok, the Western-educated son of one of the landlords, and to Ashok's   
   Christian wife, the    
   arrogant Pinky Madam. As Balram experiences firsthand the humiliating   
   below-stairs life of the invisible servant class, he has his eyes opened to   
   the true nature of India; indeed, the injustices and inequalities he   
   experiences in the Ashoks' employ lead    
   him eventually to commit his gruesome crime. Hardly anything in this book   
   escapes scathing comment. Democracy is a corrupt sham, big business   
   hand-in-glove with arrogant, overweight politicians. Prostitution is endemic,   
   as is poverty, which insinuates    
   itself into the cracks of the New Delhi streets and suppurates just out of   
   sight in the old city. In one memorable scene, Balram, beginning to unravel   
   emotionally, stumbles upon a slum and finds himself confronted by a line of   
   men defecating, almost as    
   if they are adding to a wall of waste that divides them from the modern world   
   beyond. All this may sound overly didactic, but it is not. While Adiga is at   
   pains to criticize and accuse, The White Tiger rests on some satisfyingly   
   robust literary    
   foundations. Admirably structured (we may know the nature of Balram's crime   
   early on, but we still need to discover the why and how), the book also boasts   
   some pin-sharp insights. Nervously entertaining a prostitute, Balram is   
   brought up short by the    
   woman's big, unsettling smile: "I knew it well," he explains. "It was the   
   smile a servant gives a master." Searching for a prosperous "housing colony"   
   in Delhi, he recognizes it from the garbage outside the walls; "...you knew   
   that rich people lived here,   
   " he comments dryly, from the sheer quantity of refuse littering the street.   
   Adiga can, too, be keen in his psychological insights, as well as strikingly   
   poetic in his depictions -- the cars of the rich, with their tinted windows,   
   seem to Balram like    
   lustrous dark eggs wandering the streets. "Every now and then an egg will   
   crack open -- a woman's hand, dazzling with gold bangles, stretches out of an   
   open window, flings an empty mineral water bottle onto the road -- and then   
   the window goes up, and    
   the egg is resealed." But perhaps the greatest triumphs of this novel are   
   Adiga's individual portraits of his characters, and in particular his   
   complicated, impressively modulated depiction of the relationship between   
   Balram -- sly and na?ve, deferential    
   and angry, ignorant and intelligent -- and Ashok, who doesn't know whether to   
   sneer at Balram or sympathize with him, and who has come back from New York   
   burdened by a liberal sensibility he is too weak to act on. It is a   
   beautifully nuanced performance    
   in a book of both remarkable subtlety and extraordinary power. India has   
   rarely looked as raw as it does in this memorable debut, and has rarely been   
   upbraided with such impressive, righteous anger. --Andrew Holgate   
      
      
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    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)