The White Tiger

Today, on my journey to and from my beach book club meeting, I finished listening to The White Tiger. Since I 'read' the novel by listening to its audio version, I have no concept of chapters, only of discs--seven of them. Disc one introduced the narrator, White Tiger, as a wry and witty murderer who, from a secret hide-out, tells his life's story through letters written to the Chinese Premier who will soon be visiting India. At first, I enjoyed White Tiger's sense of humor, and both his situation and the novel's epistolary structure piqued my curiosity. Unfortunately, my interest in his tale deteriorated throughout discs two and three. The protagonist's recollections of his childhood and young adulthood rarely sustained my interest. The needlessly long-winded details of his life growing up with a rickshaw-driver father intrigued me, but as the story went along I found most of these elaborate childhood stories to be largely irrelevant.

Luckily, the novel's pace picked up in disc four and I found myself hesitating to turn the car off when I arrived at my destination, so that I could discover how the White Tiger--a cunning, illiterate, low-caste, and loyal servant--got his name on a wanted poster.

This novel would not be an appropriate whole-class text in a unit on Indian literature due to its profanity, references to sex and prostitutes, and slow pace. Offered as an optional text, it might garner some interest with a particular type of student who will not be turned off by a loquacious first person narrator with a dry wit and a criminal background.

Next up, I'm looking forward to continuing The God of Small Things and ordering Narcopolis by Jeet Thayil (@jeetthayil), which recently made the #ManBookerPrize long list.