Love and Longing in Bombay

Chandra Vikram

Description

In these five haunting stories Vikram Chandra paints a remarkable picture of Bombay its ghosts, its passions, its feuds, its mysteries while exploring timeless questions of the human spirit. The stories are linked by a single narrator, an elusive civil servant, who, on each of five evenings, recounts an extraordinary tale to those seated around him in a smoky Bombay bar. In Shakti , two feuding business families are united by a forbidden passion; in Dharma , a soldier forced to save his life through a terrible act of self-mutilation returns to his home in Bombay to find it haunted by the spirit of a small boy; in Karma , a police inspector takes on a murder case and finds himself drawn further into spiralling layers of corruption and deceit. Tightly controlled and luminously written, this outstanding collection confirms Vikram Chandra as one of today s most exciting writers.

Sujets

• Love
• Love (disambiguation)
• Short story

Informations

• Publié par: Penguin Books Ltd
• Date de parution: 14 octobre 2000
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9789351182412
• Langue: English

Extrait

Vikram Chandra
Love and Longing in Bombay
Stories
PENGUIN BOOKS
Contents
About the Author
Dedication

Dharma
Shakti
Kama
Artha
Shanti
Acknowledgements
Read more about Vikram Chandra
Copyright
About the Author
Vikram Chandra was born in 1961. He divides his time between Mumbai and Washington, DC, where he teaches at George Washington University. He is the author of a novel Red Earth and Pouring Rain which won the David Higham Prize as well as the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Published Book. His stories have appeared in The New Yorker and The Paris Review . He can be reached by e-mail at [e-mail] .
Acclaim for Vikram Chandra
Love and Longing in Bombay is a collection of first-rate stories with vivid characters and a style that conjures up with swift economy the pain of love and longing . . . In many ways. Love and Longing in Bombay is more a novel than a collection of stories. As you can see, I liked it immensely and can t recommend it too strongly. And I can t wait for Chandra s next book.
-Outlook
. . . while [Bombay] lives and dreams, there will be more stories to be told. Vikram Chandra has given us five of the best, in a style which is sharp and addictive. We have every reason to wait for more.
-The Telegraph
Artfully told . . . Love and Longing in Bombay leaves you with characters and images that stay with you long after you put the book down.
-Indian Express
. . . Chandra might become to metropolitan India what Scott Fitzgerald was to the American jazz age.
-The Hindu
When Midnight s Children first appeared on the scene, it became necessary to re-evaluate stories from and about India. With Vikram Chandra s collection-his second book-it is time to take stock again . . . Chandra s Bombay is linguistically multiplanar and authentic . . . breathtaking in the accuracy of its detail. [Chandra does not rely] on the repertoire of received rumours that also infest the city. He does not reproduce old Bombay stories as his own first inventions. He doesn t borrow metaphors, he discovers or invents them.
-The Observer
The qualities that give [ Love and Longing in Bombay ] its freshness and originality are-to mention a few-the ordinariness of his protagonists, the very modern setting of much of his narrative, the sparing allusions to contemporary events, the evocation in throwaway metaphors of life as it is lived, day by day, in one of the world s most crowded and vibrant cities . . . Compassionate and penetrating.
-Times Literary Supplement
[Vikram Chandra s] new book confirms him as a writer gifted equally with profound compassion and glowing technique . . . In its teeming history, secrecy, abundance and menace, the city becomes an image of the endlessly astonishing possibilities of human encounter between lovers, mothers and sons, policemen, computer programmers . . . The book is a rainbow of storytelling beautifully timed, felt and observed.
-Daily Telegraph
A sequence of taut, vivid short stories set in contemporary Bombay which demonstrates that, as well as the fantastic imaginative profusion and the lyric gift manifested in [Chandra s] first book, he also has the discipline necessary to bring a story into sharper focus until its clarity becomes dazzling and the versatility of one in sure control of his medium . . . Chandra s stories have the resonance of classic fables, and this is derived not from any portentous allusions, but from Chandra s musical, highly charged prose, which hints at tremendous events and unassuageable sorrow.
-Sunday Times
Vikram Chandra has effected a number of miracles in his new book, a collection of interrelated short stories which I believe stands up as a really fine novel . . . Love and Longing in Bombay is a book that seeps and chatters in the mind of the reader whenever it is set aside. When you finish it, you miss it, as you miss a city, as Bombayites must miss their city even while living in it, on account of its unchanging traditions and daily frantic adaptations to the demands of the population, the industry, the west and the century . . . How rare and calm a talent . . . Chandra has decided to distil. The effect is dazzling.
-The Independent on Sunday
This book of five connected tales is full and free and utterly alive, confidently crossing and recrossing contemporary Bombay. These stories are not, in the contemporary Anglo-American mode, temples to the symbol, or museums of the one resonant image that controls meaning. They dip their bucket into a different source. They have a gorgeous elasticity, and an absolute naturalness. All the powers of storytelling that distinguished Chandra s first novel, Red Earth and Pouring Rain , are mashed into a book half the size . . . It is remarkable to read a book in which so little is forced, nothing pursed, pomposities not imposed, elegances not fondled. And this is not a merely negative triumph. These stories offer a world. They have the fronded, trailing carelessness that is never truly careless, and which comes from being dragged across actual lives.
-Guardian
Immensely absorbing . . . Impeccably controlled, intelligent, sensuous and sometimes grim, Chandra s timeless and timely book is remarkably life-affirming, considering the dark areas of the heart he explores.
-Publisher s Weekly
Chandra s earlier novel Red Earth was justly lionised; these . . . perfectly crafted stories should gain him even more admirers. Each is a telling portrait of Bombay society; a slice of life among the gossipy nouveau riche and a great, noir-ish detective story were personal favourites-but what truly astonishes is the variety of subjects and the author s fluency in tackling them.
-Options
Vikram Chandra guards the sauna room of the soul, keeping the coals afizz as he saturates the air with dire reminders of fallible, finite, flawed existence . . . [These stories] are told by a wise ex-civil servant, Subramaniam, as our narrator. This structure both formalizes the storytelling act, and gives it purpose as a pastime, as entertainment and as instruction. It also emphasizes Chandra s narrative distance, allowing the stories to yield their own meaning and inner yearnings, which twinned with love, provide both the basis for their force and the book s grand title and design.
-Scotland on Sunday
[ Love and Longing in Bombay ] is impeccably controlled and possesses a luminous intelligence.
-The Herald
An interlocking of stories, five main stories, out of which dozens of other shorter narratives unfold, one story begetting another and another in the concentric kind of narrative structuring Chandra evidently loves. The result, in a prose so lucid and transparent as to be endlessly reassuring, is a maelstrom of loss, desire and romance . . . The sense builds up throughout Love and Longing in Bombay of a chaotic city laden with stories that are waiting to be found, unravelled, saved; and the sense, too, that we can only understand ourselves through the stories of others, which is the true generosity at the heart of Chandra s art. Extremely readable, Chandra s prose is shot through with moments of psychological clarity, beauty and revelation.
-Scotsman
The five stories are all love stories, yet they are also stylish mysteries. Chandra s style is reminiscent of the nineteenth-century short story in his elegant plots and his interests in ghosts (in Dharma ), high society (in Shakti ), detectives (in Kama ) and gangsters (in Artha ). But Love and Longing in Bombay is very much set in Bombay and in the twentieth century-the nostalgic poise of the prose is blended with the sweep and chaos of modern Indian city life. This is a winning combination . . . Love and Longing in Bombay is a thoroughly enjoyable collection written by an accomplished and promising writer.
-Literary Review
For all his technical complexity, Chandra s prose is calm and assured and free of excess. The stories themselves have a perfect, fractal symmetry, each stroke containing the whole in a series of breathtaking, ever-expanding reflections. One forgets, until it suddenly happens, what it s like to have to put a book down and walk around the room because everything in it is so good and so inevitable that you have no idea what s going to happen next
-Weekly s Literary Supplement
[Vikram Chandra] conjures up an India of glittering Bombay sophisticates, gritty policemen, high finance and low crime. At the core of the book are two novellas of rare narrative force . . . a sureness of touch and mastery of structure that are deeply satisfying . . . Love and Longing in Bombay stands out as a considerable achievement, one in which the author marries his storytelling prowess to a profound understanding of India s ageless and ever-changing society . . . The beguiling self-confidence of Mr Chandra s prose is its own vindication . . . Today, a new breed of Bombayite-speaking Marathi, disdaining cosmopolitanism and espousing sectarian discipline and Hindu resurgence-has come to power, and the city is the officially renamed Mumbai. With Love and Longing in Bombay , Mr Chandra is advertising his allegiances. In the face of the Mumbaikars nativism, his writing-worldly, eclectic and humane-reaffirms the old Bombay.
-NewYork Times Book Review
Richly inventive and confident . . . Love and Longing in Bombay is an intricately built book, but it never feels murky or obtuse. Once the reader is enticed onto Chandra s carpet, the ride is smooth and sweeping, and the vistas that open up are filled with passages of surprising magic
-LA Times
With echoes of the cacophony of Rushdie and the sensuousness of Ondaatje, Vikram Chandra spins bitter-sweet tales of ghosts and murders, social climbing and hidden pasts in the tumultuous world of modern-day Bombay-Mumbai . . . A bewitching brew of stories, full of promise, passion, and style.
-Paper Magazine
Chandra, whose acclaimed novel Red Earth and Pouring