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The
2003 Award
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The Death of Vishnu by Manil Suri
Nominated by:
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Publisher of Nominated Edition: W.W. Norton ISBN 0393050424 |
| the complete A-Z listing of nominated authors. |
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ABOUT
THE BOOK
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| Vishnu,
the resident odd-job man, lies dying on the staircase he inhabits, while
his neighbours, the Pathaks and the Asranis, squabble over who will pay
for an ambulance. As the action spirals up through the floors of their building,
the dramas of the residents' lives unfold: Mr. Jalal's obsessive search
for higher meaning; Vinod Taneja's longing for the wife he has lost; the
comic elopement of Kavita Asrani, who fancies herself the heroine of a Hindi
movie. Suffused with Hindu mythology and the exuberance of Bombay cinema, this story of one apartment building becomes a metaphor for the social and religious divisions of contemporary India, and Vishnu's ascent of the staircase parallels the soul's progress through the various stages of existence. As Vishnu closes in on the riddle of his own mortality, he begins to wonder whether he might not be the god, Vishnu, guardian not only of the fate of the building and its occupants but also of the entire universe. |
| ABOUT THE AUTHOR |
| Manil Suri grew up in Mumbai (Bombay), India. He received his Ph.D. in mathematics form Carnegie-Mellon University, and is a mathematics professor at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker. He lives in Maryland, U.S.A. The Death of Vishnu is his first novel. |
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Reader
Review
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Vishnu lives and sleeps on the stairs and landing of a block of flats in Bombay. He provides certain services for the flat dwellers in exchange for his accomodation. The novel is essentially about these flat dwellers, their enmities, eccentricities and the problem which Vishnu, now dying on the stairs, is causing them. Meanwhile, Vishnu is dreaming about the past, the good times and the bad and also having visions about what the world beyond holds for him - is he really a reincarnation of the god Vishnu and is he going into glory. There is much to interest the Western reader about life in modern India, its customs, superstitions, religious practices, the food and also its pre-occupation with modern Indian cinema and its stories of romantic love at variance with the apparantly still general practice of arranged marriages. It is also a very comic book in its depiction of the small wars over shared kitchens, water supplies, etc., in an apartment block. But it falters half way in introducing themes of religious and racial conflict and then side-stepping them. The book cannot make its mind up whether to be a humorous take on modern Indian life or about the fault line of religious tension between the two main groups in Indian. While it is an enyoyable read it leaves the reader a little bewildered as to whether it is meant to be a comic novel or something altogether more serious. Raheny Library Readers' Group Member |
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Find
out more about the author on the following websites: |
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