The White Tiger and The Interpreter of Maladies - Book reviews

The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga, is the winner of the 2008 Man Booker prize for fiction. It follows Balram Halwai, the ambitious son of a poor rickshaw puller, as he undertakes an incredible journey from darkness to light, from the bottom of the food chain to the top. It’s the story of an illiterate villager who makes it big in life despite facing huge obstacles such as an ancient feudal society, a primitive caste system, rampant corruption and nepotism, and extreme poverty and injustice. Balram Halwai though born to live with water buffalos, sleep with bugs, and die as another component of the "rooster coop", manages to change his destiny in one quick but dark moment. This reversal of fortune is certainly not achieved without stepping on a pile of innocent dead bodies.

The book is written in the form of 7 letters to the Chinese Premier, explaining Halwai‘s transformation from a servant to a master. Halwai presents himself as an embodiment of India’s abundant entrepreneurial talent; suggesting that China too can embrace and adopt this spirit if it follows Halwai's example.

The White Tiger definitely made for a very interesting reading, especially in the first half, though it does not turn out be as inspiring as it promises to be. Although, Halwai pretends to be a focused entrepreneur, he lacks originality of ideas and brilliance of planning. The harsh and extreme portrayal of individual characters and parts of society in only black and white colors is rather unconvincing. Overall, a humorous and fast moving novel, though unworthy of a Booker.

Jhumpa Lahiri’s, The Interpreter of Maladies, won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2000. It’s a collection of nine short stories about the emotional experiences of Indians in India and abroad. The sleep inducing stories in this book leave you without feeling connected with the characters. There isn’t an inkling of humour as Lahiri churns out one dry sentence after another in a mechanical and completely uninspiring manner of storytelling. Not surprisingly, I was not able to bring myself to read beyond a third of the book. There are a couple of stories in this book that make you feel like the author’s been living in a bubble since 1970 and has no cognition of modern India. I was also a little irritated by small mistakes in the details such as calling the language spoken in Orissa as “Orissi” (a form of dance) instead of Oriya. The author was born and brought up outside of India and such mistakes, trivial as they may sound, reveal the author’s lack of intimate knowledge of India and cast doubts on the authenticity of her own experiences which are probably the foundation for this book.