Finished
The White Tiger: a Novel (2008)
(winner of the 2008 Booker Prize)
by Aravind Adiga.
It's good, somewhat cute in its form -- a modern Shaherazad (for a few nights rather than a thousand)
who is a self-declared Indian
entrepreneur and murderer, e-mails his life history, cultural advice,
and political and social criticism, in nightly messages to a Chinese official.
I found myself impatient and
decided to speed read some of the earlier and middle portions.
And cut to the chase of the self-justifying psychopath,
who believes that, by his killing his rich master,
he has sacrificed his entire family (17 members?) to death.
The narrator meditates (p. 160 of first edition hard-cover):
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Do we loathe our masters behind a facade of love —
or do we love them behind a facade of loathing.
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The power for the narrator begins with his schooling
and his learning to write, so that eventually books become electrical for him (p. 175):
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So I stood around that big square of books.
Standing around books, even books in a foreign language,
your feel a kind of electricity buzzing up toward you, Your Excellency.
It just happens,
the way you get erect around girls wearing tight jeans.
Except here what happens is that your brain starts to hum.
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Yes, it's this energy that leads Balram Halwi in his murderous path from servant to entrepreneur.
However, in the end, the madness of someone writing nightly to
His Excellency Premier Wen Jiabao
sounds too much of a fable to be true.
Unless, perhaps,
His Excellency Premier Wen Jiabao
would like to sign his own death warrant.
Unless, of course, he could be a sufficiently cruel boss to intimidate even Balram Halwi.
Links.
The Mental Health of George W. Bush
