Love and Longing in Bombay - Hardcover

Chandra, Vikram

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0571175279 ISBN 13: 9780571175277

Publisher: Faber and Faber, 1997

Synopsis

Welcome to the Fisherman's Rest, a little bar off the Sasoon Dock in Bombay where Mr. Subramaniam spins his tales for a select audience. This is the setting for Vikram Chandra's collection of seven short stories, Love and Longing in Bombay, and Subramaniam is Chandra's Scheherezade. In these stories, Chandra has covered the gamut of genres: there is a ghost story, a love story, a murder mystery, and a crime story, each tale joined to the others by the voice of the elusive narrator. In "Shakti," a discussion about real estate leads to the story of a soldier who must exorcise a ghostly child from his family home. In the final story, "Shanti," a young woman's despair about the state of the country becomes a springboard for a tale of love and hope. Love and Longing in Bombay is a mesmerizing collection, filled with fully rounded characters and stories that resonate long after the book is back on the shelf. Chandra's prose is luminous, his tales satisfying.Scheherezade would be impressed.

About this title

About the Author:

Born in New Delhi, India, in 1961, Vikram Chandra now divides his time between Bombay and Washington D.C., where he teaches at George Washington University. He is a graduate of Pomona College, Los Angeles and Columbia University Film School in New York. His stories have appeared in the New Yorker and the Paris Review. His debut novel, Red Earth and Pouring Rain, was awarded the David Higham Prize for Fiction and the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for the Best First Published Book. His collection of stories, Love and Longing in Bombay, was published in 1997 and won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for the Eurasia region. It was also shortlisted for the Guardian Fiction Prize, and was included in the New York Times Book Review's 'Notable Books of the Year', and also in both the Guardian and Independent's 'Books of the Year' round-ups.

From Kirkus Reviews:

Five ingeniously linked long stories by the young Indian-born author whose impressive fictional debut was the magical-realist Red Earth and Pouring Rain (1995). These stories, which are uniformly full-bodied and richly detailed, are told by a convivial yet enigmatic civil servant, Subramaniam, to his attentive cronies in a bar called the Fisherman's Rest. Each recounts a quest of some kind, and all are distinguished by unusually detailed and persuasive characterizations. ``Dharma'' tells of a stoical combat veteran who experiences ``phantom pain'' in his amputated leg and consequently a ghostly visitation that brings equally painful memories of his childhood. ``Shakti'' is an amusing tale of rivalry between two socially ambitious women that is resolved by an unexpected alliance. In ``Kama,'' the investigation of an apparently open-and- shut robbery and murder uncovers a morass of sexual and political misdoing and the complicated personal life of Sartaj, the police detective who learns as much about himself as about the killer he pursues. ``Artha'' and ``Shanti,'' respectively, describe a gay computer programmer's dangerous search for information about his disappeared lover, and a twin bereft of his brother and in love with a beautiful married woman who travels ceaselessly looking for the truth about her long-lost husband, a soldier reported missing in action. ``Love and longing'' indeed are thus, in various ways, the motive forces behind these pieces--and in the last, the tale- teller Subramaniam is himself an important presence, and we realize how the preceding stories have also expressed aspects of his own loves and longings. A brilliant work, equally effective in its radiant separate parts and as a pleasingly complex and highly original construction. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Faber and Faber
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 0571175279
• ISBN 13: 9780571175277
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1