The White Tiger

A fine Booker winner

Don't get me wrong, I loved "God of Small Things" and enjoyed "A Suitable Boy" and still think "Shame" is Rushdie's finest novel, but Adiga's "White Tiger" explores a very different India. No elaborate weddings, no saris and spices, no arranged marriages - this is the India of the economic miracle of the 'Electronic City' that is Bangalore, of self-appointed 'entrepreneurs' like Balram Halwai who have come from "the Darkness" of small villages and are eager for wealth and status.

Written in the form of a seven letters to Wen Jiabao, the visiting Chinese premier, offering him lessons in entrepreneurship and democracy, but Balram's rags-to-riches tales is in fact it is a lesson in poverty, humiliation and murder. Adiga's narrative voice is sharp and sardonic, his grasp of telling images and details haunting and his satire of the Indian middle classes lacerating. This is not a novel for those with romantic illusions about India - it is angry, didactic, funny, furious and viscerally compelling

33 of 37 people found this review helpful

GOOD STORY SHAME ABOUT THE READER

I am struggling to finish listening to this book as the reader is so poor. I find her delivery deeply irritating. It sounds like she has never read an audio book before and that there is no direction. Her monotone voice makes the production seem amateur. It is such a shame. I think I will have to read the book this time.

26 of 32 people found this review helpful

Dispiriting

This is an interesting novel and well worth listening to, but I found as it went on that I was feeling more and more depressed about people in general, the Indian subcontinent in particular and the effect of global capitalism on us all. It is very well written, often amusing, often dark and a stark portrayal of old feudal India and modern urban India, both portrayed as lacking in morality and ruled by ignorance, manipulation, cunning and corruption. The few lines of hopeful optimism at the end do not outweigh the heaviness and cynicism created by the book as a whole and I was glad it was relatively short. The reader makes a few mistakes but reads it very well. But why a woman reading when this is very much the story of a man and delivered in the first person?

16 of 20 people found this review helpful

Expected more

I had high hopes for this book. I love India and have travelled there a lot, I also love to read about it. My brother recommended this book so I was keen to try it. After the first 2 chapters I wasn't sure but thought I would stick with it, However, I was ultimately a bit disappointed. The reader didn't really help to enthuse me. Didn't like the main character too much and the pace was slow. The story had potential but didn't really do it for me. It was just ok.

11 of 15 people found this review helpful

Appalling narration

Would you recommend this book to a friend? Why or why not?

The book probably deserves three for the story line. But the narration was so awful, I wouldn't recommend the audiobook. I think it was reasonable to have a female voice narrating for a boy. But the accent was overdone, often similar across characters and, conversation was often mixed up with prose.

The main character isn't plausible. The only way to make the story work is to make the assumption that much of what is going on in his head to explain his behaviour is untold. Moreover very little in the story told allows any inferences to be made. It's an account of events which seems to promise more, but doesn't deliver.

10 of 14 people found this review helpful

Just wonderful.

This book is just wonderful. I was transported to a modern and fascinating, if often brutal and ruthless India. I loved the main character in all his guises, and I was rooting for him throughout the book, even though at times I did cringe, I did understand where he was coming from. The narrator delivers the story with perfect pitch and tone and a voice totally suited to the character. I could not stop listening till I had heard the whole story. I lost a weekend in blissful tense, often harrowing drama which brought an all too realistic view of India which I had previously romanticised from lovely holiday experinces. I love the place, but I have a whole new understanding now. A fantastic book. Buy it!!!!

1 of 1 people found this review helpful

Shame about the narrator

A gripping story offering insights into the underbelly of Indian culture. However, the effect is dimished by the reader who sounds very much like she is reading the story for the first time, complete with incorrect pauses and mispronunciations.

15 of 22 people found this review helpful

True India

A magnificent tale, beginning in 'the darkness', deep interior India which provides the servants to the middle classes of Guragaon. The journey of the White Tiger is wonderfully vivid, from the coal fields of Bihar to the fairy-tale towers of Gurgaon, and on to twenty-first century Bangalore, each location drawn with brilliant and cruel accuracy, and each character with its real-life parallels. I'm not sure I'd give this to my friends whose lives are reflected here, the depictions of place and person are so close to the bone! Aravind Adiga does justice to the wonderful complexity of India.

9 of 13 people found this review helpful

The White Tiger

Very enjoyable read, nice story line and very educational about India and it's history. First book of A Adiga I had listened but, would happy to listen anymore he writes

11 of 17 people found this review helpful

enjoyable, thought-provoking, but over-priced

In common with the other reviewers I was hooked by the picture painted of India by Aravind Adiga who, by virtue of his Indian nationality but international career, seems particularly well qualified to paint it. The choice of Bindya Solanki to read it is an interesting one - why a woman, when the main character is an adult male for much of the book? That said, Bindya Solanki produces a good range of voices and accents which in themselves are a source of pleasure to listen to; but she also makes a number of misinterpretations of the meaning, in fact small mistakes which one would have expected to be edited and corrected in a recording of this price. Well worth getting as a Member's Credit purchase, not worth paying full price.

9 of 14 people found this review helpful