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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
The promise continues,
By
This review is from: Love and Longing in Bombay: Stories (Paperback)
In LOVE AND LONGING IN BOMBAY, Vikram Chandra builds upon the extraordinary promise shown in his first novel RED EARTH AND POURING RAIN. This is a collection of five stories (actually three stories and two novellas) that are very loosely connected. (I did not buy the connection, by the way.) Each is set in a different social milieu, revealing a very broad spectrum of modern Indian life. The first story, about an amputee army veteran exorcising a ghost, is expendable. The second story, a comic take on Indian high society, is much more entertaining. The book really takes off, though, with the third story (really a novella), which is a riveting sex/noir police story. But the best selection is the long story dealing with a gay computer mechanic and his nouveau riche business partner (a female programmer) and their tangled love lives in Bombay's bohemian and business worlds. The final entry is a melancholy story set in 1945 which tells how an innocent village man woos a young war widow who will not give up hope of finding her missing (and presumed dead) husband. The collection's total effect is pretty dazzling. I hope Mr. Chandra will continue to write in a realistic style. This book is far more interesting than the fantastical RED EARTH AND POURING RAIN, which became tiresome because there was no earthly logic involved in its development. In this collection Chandra is also more focused than he was in the novel. This is incisive and poetic language from a mind that has observed two cultures both objectively and empathetically. The book is not without its flaws. The first story, apart from the descriptive language, is a string of cliches. The final story has a Chinese-puzzle structure similar to RED EARTH AND POURING RAIN's that would have become very tiresome had it been any longer. But I think Chandra has the potential to be a great writer. He's on the right track. I very much look forward to his next book.
23 of 26 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Classic storytelling and superb writing,
By
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: Love and Longing in Bombay: Stories (Paperback)
Between 1925 and 1965, the force of Ernest Hemingway's prose ravaged two generations of American writers by seducing them into pathetic imitation of the inimitable. In India, over the past twenty years, the success of Salman Rushdie's writing (all surface brilliance, not-so-magical-realism, and an underlying condescension toward all living things other than the author) has corrupted the style of far too many Indian writers--faced with a dynamic reality to equal any on earth, they slip into silliness, excess and metaphor. Vikram Chandra is a remarkable, startling and very welcome exception. Mr. Chandra is a marvelous storyteller. This matters, because telling a good story, not cleverness and fireworks, is what fiction is about. Writing in the handsome, clean prose that seems effortless to non-writers (while arousing jealousy in fellow writers), Chandra seduces the reader quickly and doesn't break the spell until the last page of his tales. These novellas of life in Bombay from the Independence era to the hi-tech age have the old-fashioned ability to make the reader neglect other matters until he or she finds out what happened. Unlike Mr. Rushdie, whose main characters never seem more than sly intellectual constructs, Mr. Chandra's characters live for us. We CARE about their fates. We believe that they are real. Their wounds are, faintly at least, our own. I recommend this to any lover of good fiction, and I look forward to future volumes from this wonderful, dauntingly-talented author.
12 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Superb Collection of Contemporary Tales,
By A Customer
This review is from: Love and Longing in Bombay: Stories (Paperback)
A year ago, I read the Booker Prize-winning novelist Arundhati Roy's _The God of Small Things_ on a whim and - I'll admit it - on its wave of accolades. I enjoyed it thoroughly. It heralded for me a year of informal study of South Asian literature written in English. The next book I happened to pick up was Vikram Chandra's _Love and Longing in Bombay_, a collection of three short stories and two novellas that left me with an even stronger sentiment, one of being simply "blown away". The five tales in this collection are, at several levels, linked to one another and though the title of the collective work might suggest otherwise, they deal with nearly every aspect of contemporary life in India. If there is any one theme that stands out, I would submit that it is that age-old topic of literature: loss. These are "slice of life" stories that reflect upon the dazzling complexities, conflicts and vicissitudes inherent to life and they - like life itself - do not arrive at neatly packaged conclusions. I found the prose to be at once simple, yet elegant and sophisticated. The storytelling prowess of Mr. Chandra is obvious from the get go, and though it is undoubtedly true that he has been endowed with a gift from the gods, it is also equaly true that the young author is a well-studied stylist. There are passages in this collection that I have committed to memory, simply for the joy of hearing the language in my mind. Mr. Chandra is an incredibly observant, psychologically-minded and sensitive author and his supremely well-rounded characters have stayed with me - shall I dare say? - for an entire year, such is the impact of his prose. With the exception of the final tale ("Shanti"), they are all set in Bombay, the mega-metropolis of modern-day India. Each one is begun with the enigmatic storyteller, a retired civil servant named Subramaniam, uttering the enticing, "Listen," and each one may be considered a genre piece. So, for example, there is a ghost story ("Dharma"), a high-brow soap opera ("Shakti"), and a murder mystery detective story ("Kama"). If - as people have correctly pointed out to me - each one is a gem, then the two novellas, "Kama" and "Artha", I would argue, are very close to being nearly perfectly-cut diamonds. Having given this collection as a gift to a number of people, I can state unabashedly that not one has uttered anything short of superlative to describe his time spent with this book. I, for one, started each story with a piping hot cup of chai masala and could hardly wait to come back to them after a long day's work. This one is a must read for anyone who enjoys that sublime pleasure of succumbing to the powers of a truly gifted and immensely talented storyteller.
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