the owl and the olive tree

The White Tiger, by Aravind Adiga. (Man Booker Prize winner.)

The White Tiger is written as a letter from Balram, the protagonist, to Wen Jiabao, the Premier of the People's Republic of China -- a letter whose purpose, Balram says, is to explain "the truth about Bangalore" by describing his own life story and the way that he became what he calls a "self-made entrepreneur." Most of the book -- apart from asides where the adult Balram addresses Wen Jiabao directly -- are a depiction of Balram's childhood of extreme deprivation in rural India, and his efforts to pull himself out of it before it kills him, as it did both his parents.

The name of the book comes from a scene early in the book while Balram was still in school, when his (drunk -- at the time and in general) teacher got a surprise inspection from the government. The official questioned the students; Balram, bright and ambitious, was the only one who impressed him. He compared Balram to the white tiger, 'the rarest animal in the forest -- and by the comparison indicates that he has no expectation of finding intelligent and determined students in rural villages with any more frequency than he would find a white tiger. He arranged for Balram to receive a scholarship. And in a more hopeful book, that would be the first step in the direction of Balram's progress out of poverty: that Balram should get a scholarship, better education, movement out of the crushing inequity of his childhood.

This is not that kind of hopeful book. Before Balram got even a sniff of the scholarship, his grandmother pulled him out of school and sent him to work in the teahouse to pay for the wedding of one of his female cousins. (Weddings are treated much like natural disasters in the book, unavoidable crises -- at least the weddings of female relatives: each of the men in Balram's family got pulled out of school to work to pay for the wedding of a female relative.) There's no question after that that he'll get more education. He was sucked into the pattern of work and death that doomed his father and mother both.

(I should pause here and say that I know embarrassingly little about poverty and class in India. For the purposes of this review, I'm taking the book at face value -- although it's a sign to me that I could definitely stand to educate myself more on this subject.)

Balram does find a way out -- but it's got nothing to do with the naive 'pull yourself up by your own bootstraps' fantasies that I'm familiar with from most rags-to-riches stories.

( And I can't talk about it more without spoilers, so, cut. )

This book reminded me a great deal of The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian; I tried to avoid too many comparisons in the rest of the review in order to allow this one to stand alone, but I can't help it, I have to indulge the comparison here. They're both about ambitious, intelligent young men born to crushing poverty, living in towns/villages with very little possibility for improvement, and fighting for a better chance -- and more to the point, both are exceptionally depressing but written in a way that's very funny. I think I'd like The White Tiger better if it didn't remind me of Absolutely True Diary, because... because I just didn't like Balram as much as I liked Junior. I don't think this is a failing of the book: it's pretty clearly partly about the way people act in extremity, and the way people act in extremity is not always pretty. It's a bleak, bleak book, and the fact that it's funny doesn't obscure the way that it's deeply depressing.

And yet -- and yet Balram gets a happy ending, of sorts. It's just -- it's not a cheerful happy ending. It's a making-the-most-of-horrible-things happy ending. It's a happy ending in which the protaginst admits that he still has to ignore certain things that have happened, certain things he has done.

It was a very good read, sucked me in and didn't let me go, and gave me so much to think about. It was also about as far from a comfortable read as I can imagine, so do be aware of that if you're planning to read it.

Running Tally:

Total Books: 12
Fiction: 2
Non-Fiction: 10
POC Author: 2

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, by Sherman Alexie. YA novel.

Junior has spent his whole life in the town of Wellpint on the Spokane Indian Reservation, as has his whole family back as long as there's been a rez. When time comes for him to enter high school, he decides to go to the local (all-white) non-reservation high school, twenty miles away, in what is quite literally a search for hope. He grapples with personal problems -- the fact that he is kind of a goofy-looking dork, joining the basketball team and what goes with it -- and broader ones, such as the problems of community, identity, and where he belongs, which ties together with the high-school issues when his basketball team plays against the reservation high school's basketball team. "It was like being Indian was my job, but it was only a part- time job. And it didn't pay well at all."

...I don't like that summary much at all, because it makes this sound like a pretty cliche caught-between-two-worlds novel, and it's really not, at least not to me. For one thing, it's very specific. I don't know much about the Spokane tribe and reservation (shamefully little, considering I grew up right there), but I do know the landscape the book is set in, and I've walked a hundred times through schools exactly like the little non-reservation high school he describes. It's not a book about some kid in some culture clash; it's very much about this kid, this culture clash, this environment, this place. Also, Junior's voice is sharp and funny and very real, as are his comics (as drawn by Ellen Forney). He's intelligent (in a sarcastic kind of way) but also basically a teenage boy, and I believed both things about him. I liked him, which always helps. Even though his experiences and mine are radically different, and he as a character is radically different from me, he was very familiar -- the 'being a goofy-looking dork' thing, the sarcasm and wit, were things I recognized.

The one thing about this book is that, despite being very funny, it's also got points of being very depressing -- Alexie doesn't sugarcoat problems on the reservation, and the alcohol and poverty and racism is pretty grinding, both to Junior and to me as a reader, even though the novel doesn't set up shop in angstville and live there. The complexity of the issues involved, and Junior's approach to them, his wit and his stubbornness, keep it from being a downer book, but there are surely downer moments; it's most definitely not fluffy-comfort-reading YA (though it's also not really a lynchings-and-dog-shootings YA either).

I liked it a lot. In general I love Sherman Alexie's work -- have ever since I saw Smoke Signals, the movie based on some of his short stories in The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, which prompted me to read that book and Reservation Blues and some of his poetry. (It always seems a little ironic to me that I didn't find Alexie's work until I'd left my hometown -- which is maybe two hours from the Spokane Indian reservation that he is from and writes so much about.) And by the way, I love Smoke Signals, especially the character Thomas; if you like independent movies and haven't seen this one, do, and especially if you're in the Northwest and like regional works.

Recommended.