About the book, from the publisher:
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.Among the early acclaim for The White Tiger:
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.
"Compelling, angry, and darkly humorous, The White Tiger is an unexpected journey into a new India. Aravind Adiga is a talent to watch."Read an excerpt from The White Tiger, and learn more about the novel at the publisher's website.
--Mohsin Hamid, author of The Reluctant Fundamentalist
"An exhilarating, side-splitting account of India today, as well as an eloquent howl at her many injustices. Adiga enters the literary scene resplendent in battle dress and ready to conquer. Let us bow to him."
--Gary Shteyngart, author of Absurdistan and The Russian Debutante's Handbook
"Balram Halwai is a clever and resourceful narrator with a witty and sarcastic edge that endears him to readers.... It's the perfect antidote to lyrical India."
--Publishers Weekly
"...extraordinary and brilliant..."
--Adam Lively, Times (London)
"In the grand illusions of a 'rising' India, Aravind Adiga has found a subject Gogol might have envied. With remorselessly and delightfully mordant wit, The White Tiger anatomizes the fantastic cravings of the rich; it evokes, too, with startling accuracy and tenderness, the no less desperate struggles of the deprived."
--Pankaj Mishra, author of Temptations of the West
"Aravind Adiga's riveting, razor-sharp debut novel explores with wit and insight the realities of [the' two Indias, and reveals what happens when the inhabitants of one collude and then collide with those of the other."
--Soumya Bhattacharya, Independent
"Unlike almost any other Indian novel you might have read in recent years, this page-turner offers a completely bald, angry, unadorned portrait of the country as seen from the bottom of the heap; there's not a sniff of saffron or a swirl of sari anywhere.... [Narrator] Balram himself is an enticing figure...but even more impressive is the nitty-gritty of Indian life that Adiga unearths -- the corruption, the class system, the sheer petty viciousness."
--Andrew Holgate, The Sunday Times ( London)
"Darkly comic. . . Balram's appealingly sardonic voice and acute observations of the social order are both winning and unsettling."
--The New Yorker
Aravind Adiga was born in India and raised partly in Australia. He attended Columbia and Oxford universities. A former correspondent for Time magazine, he has also been published in the Financial Times.
The Page 69 Test: The White Tiger.
--Marshal Zeringue
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