I was a huge fan of Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger, so I was intrigued to hear that he’d released a new novel—and focused on cricket. I’ll confess that I know very little about cricket, and what little I do know is based on Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland. That said, you don’t really need to know a whole lot to get invested in the story. It’s an interesting contemporary tale, even if it doesn’t have quite the same original spark that fueled The White Tiger. Selection […]
The Uncaged Tiger
My friend C and I exchange a lot of book ideas. We started our PhDs in the same class, we ended up choosing the same literary subfield, and we have the same dissertation director. She’s read some of my primary texts, and I realized I’ve not read all of hers. The White Tiger was in her list, plus I needed to up my Anglophone game. So I decided to give it a try. Balram Halwai, the White Tiger of this book, is a young entrepreneur […]
When neighbors stop being polite…
“In the old days, if a builder had a problem, that problem would end up in pieces in the wet concrete: it became part of the building it had tried to obstruct. A bit of calcium was good for the foundations. But those days were gone: the lawless days of the 1980s and ’90s.” (321) The White Tiger was one of my favorite books of the year when I read it back in 2008. For that reason, I knew I would have to eventually get […]