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A review by kivt
The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga
5.0
This has been critiqued pretty hard for contributing to the Indian "poverty porn" industry. It didn't read that way to me for two main reasons: 1) pointed lack of a kindly white savior character & repeated digs at the West, 2) Balram's explicit, if ironic, class consciousness. I could be super off on this, but a lot of books written for white foreigners tend to pander to us pretty hard by making huge parts of the story about us, and they generally skew toward garbage about private charity and "personal responsibility" over calls for class warfare.
Adiga pulls off a lot of really difficult literary tricks. His prose is easy and entertaining to read, which clashes well with the horrors he describes. Balram is the kind of unreliable antihero protagonist that I had given up hope anyone could write in an interesting way. Adiga doesn't use depictions of Balram's vices as a socially condoned excuse to wallow in his own. Instead, they serve to explain something about Balram's context & illustrate his development into a "social entrepreneur."
Adiga pulls off a lot of really difficult literary tricks. His prose is easy and entertaining to read, which clashes well with the horrors he describes. Balram is the kind of unreliable antihero protagonist that I had given up hope anyone could write in an interesting way. Adiga doesn't use depictions of Balram's vices as a socially condoned excuse to wallow in his own. Instead, they serve to explain something about Balram's context & illustrate his development into a "social entrepreneur."