Reseñas proporcionadas por Syndetics

Library Journal Review

This sequence of five long stories by the author of the audacious Red Earth and Pouring Rain (LJ 4/1/95) expands imaginatively from the modest bar of the Fisherman's Rest, where the aging, wise Subramaniam regales his listeners with tales of the deeply human in a troubled, vibrant city. Both sophisticated and squalid, Bombay provides an appropriately colorful setting for provocative stories of jealousy, loss, secrets, and love. Quietly reeling from the disintegration of his marriage, a detective becomes more than routinely involved in a murder mystery. A social climber takes on the most prominent family in town, with surprising results. In the most enigmatic and affecting of the stories, a young computer programmer discovers the low-tech bug in a client's system and a few strange secrets of a disappeared lover during one intense, uncontrolled week. An intriguing sequence for cosmopolitan readers; for medium to large fiction collections.‘Janet Ingraham, Worthington P.L., Ohio (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Publishers Weekly Review

Five interconnecting stories set in modern Bombay provide the framework of this immensely absorbing book by the author of Red Earth and Pouring Rain. The narrator, Ranjit Sharma, a young software company employee, is drawn into the orbit of wise, retired civil servant Shiv Subramaniam, who serves as a kind of Scheherazade, telling stories that encompass many levels of human experience and subtly reveal the social and cultural levels of teeming Bombay. For four successive nights, Subramaniam holds court at the Fisherman's Rest bar; the last night Sharma comes to Subramaniam's home, where he learns something surprising about the old man himself. Each time, Subramaniam chooses storytelling to elude direct talk about a vexing question; the stories illustrate his answers. In "Dharma," a military man who had amputated his own leg without anesthesia, finds his family home haunted by the ghost of a boy who reminds him of a childhood tragedy. "Shakti" slyly paints the vivid portraits of two ambitious society women and their wary alliance. The central story, "Kama," is a bleak descent into the heart of darkness of Bombay corruption. "Artha," a more conceptual story within a story within a story, is about a young computer specialist whose contempt for Art as a language changes when his male lover disappears. Finally, "Shanti" is a tender account of Subramaniam's significant encounter with a woman who, like him, had lost illusions about life while surviving WWII. 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. U.K. rights to Faber & Faber. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Booklist Review

The art of storytelling is so precious to Chandra, a gifted storyteller with a penchant for the story-within-a-story device, that it became a matter of life and death in his debut novel, Red Earth, Pouring Rain (1995), and here, in this gleaming set of stories, it keeps his anonymous hero sane. A young man suffering the anguish of lost love accompanies a friend to a seaside bar where he falls under the spell of an inconspicuous but utterly mesmerizing older man named Subramaniam. Each night, Subramaniam tells a story that distracts and comforts Chandra's unhappy protagonist and enchants his readers. In "Dharma," a ghost story, an old soldier confronts his past. "Shakti" is a tale of fierce rivalry between two shrewd and ambitious high-society women; and "Kama" is a compellingly complex murder mystery. Each sumptuous and suspenseful tale is strikingly different from the others even as they all reflect the intricacies of Indian culture and Chandra's profound sensitivity to the vagaries of the heart and the implacability of circumstances. --Donna Seaman

Notas de autor provistas por Syndetics

Author Vikram Chandra was born in New Delhi, India in 1961. He attended college in the United States receiving a BA in English with a concentration in creative writing from Pomona College and attended the film school at Columbia University before dropping out to work on his first novel. His first novel, Red Earth and Pouring Rain, was inspired by an autobiography of a nineteenth century soldier named Colonel James "Sikander" Skinner. It won the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Book and the David Higham Prize for Fiction. His next novel, Love and Longing in Bombay, won the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best Book (Eurasia region) and was short-listed for the Guardian Fiction Prize. In 2000, he and Suketu Mehta co-wrote the Bollywood movie Mission Kashmir. He teaches creative writing at the University of California and currently divides his time between Berkeley, California and Mumbai.

(Bowker Author Biography)