The White Tiger: Good and Fresh, but not all that...

I liked this novel very much.  Many of my book club friends commented that it suffered a little in the reading coming so closely on the heels of the widely seen film Slumdog Millionaire as it covers much of the new old India-crashes-into-Modern-techno-India vibe in which the film so gloriously revels.  But putting aside coincidental timing of two cultural phenomena, this novel explores today's India through the eyes of a former lower caste peasant risen to driver to the rich, risen to multi-millionaire/murderer.  How this arc unfolds is not a spoiler, I swear as narrator admits the murder he committed in the first pages, so please don't shoot me.  The fun is how he gets there, and believe it or not, the entire novel is written in the form of letters to head of Communist China.  (You have to read it to see how well this convention actually works.)  

In any event, it is a sweeping but still very personal story of one man's journey from his village to great riches -- that from that description should feel like something you have read before, maybe A Fine Balance or the like, but the boldness of the choice of first person storytelling,the letter-writing format, showcasing the workings of multiple characters, makes it all seem very off balance and fascinating.  You get right into the head of the protagonist/antagonist and it is quick and absorbing read.

If you like stories of rapidly shifting cultural mores, and first person accounts with unpredictably great unreliable narrators you'll thoroughly enjoy this. This book has enjoyed enormous critical success and while I do think it is very good and worthy of a read, I do have to stop short of the slightly over-hyped salivating on this one.  Good but not Pulitzer good.  But still, if you like stories that give flash point insight into foreign countries and avoid the cliches that come with traditional narrative arcs, you'll get a kick out of how deftly the author embraces and skirts convention at the same time.