The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

For two months since I finished reading The White Tiger, I have been trying to understand why I am unable to agree with the accolades heaped on Aravind Adiga's novel, which even won the prestigious Booker Prize in 2008. I used to almost always strongly agree with Booker verdicts: Coetzee's Disgrace, Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day, Banville's The Sea are some of the very best books I have read in my life, and Barnes' The Sense of an Ending is close to that distinction. And yet, I don't see the greatness in The White Tiger, and my rating barely reaches three stars.

The novel paints an extremely bleak and depressing portrait of rural India, a place where corruption is the basic way of life and which is governed by the caste system. A person born in a low caste has no way upward in the social hierarchy; the caste fully determines the future of a person. Nothing can be done about it, unless someone is ready to commit a major crime. The protagonist of the novel, one Balram Halwai, born into the poor family of a rickshaw puller, chooses that drastic option and, consequently, becomes a successful entrepreneur, establishing his own company.

I understand that The White Tiger may be viewed as a sort of satirical novel, where the author aims at employing very dark humor to make his point about rural India's problems. Alas, to me, the humor is awkward and painful rather than dark, and the writing is thoroughly unremarkable. So—while I commend the author for trying to address the momentous social issues—it pains me that I am blind to the excellence of the novel noticed by the Booker Prize jury, an institution that I greatly respect.

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