Love and Longing in Bombay: Stories

by Vikram Chandra

Book Overview

On the heels of his award-winning and extravagantly praised first novel, RED EARTH AND POURING RAIN, Vikram Chandra offers five ingeniously linked stories--a love story, a mystery, a ghost story, and... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0316136778
• ISBN13: 9780316136778
• Release Date: October 1998
• Publisher: Back Bay Books
• Length: 272 Pages
• Weight: 0.65 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.5" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

Deserving of the acclaim, maybe more?

Many of the other reviews seem to concentrate on the fact that these stories take place in Bombay...and now that I think about it, I see why... However while reading Love and Longing in Bombay, the city itself didn't strike as particularly important...as one reviewer notes, this could've been any city in the world. What I liked best about the title were the characters themselves, stunningly unique...you'd be hard pressed to assign them any sort of archetype. Also, Chandra's writing makes this book worth reading, verbose but it all seems so necessary in context...I love this stuff. Can't wait for his next piece.

Classic storytelling and superb writing

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.

Brilliantly written! Creates an enchanting glimpse of Bombay

Rarely have I enjoyed a book of short stories as much as I did "Love and Longing in Bombay" I was so captivated by all the stories that putting the book down once I started was impossible!....and infact have re-read the murder-mystery and climbing up the social ladder in Bomday stories twice! He captured emotions and the energy in the characters superbly! The vivid style of writing made me feel like I was living in Vikram Chandra's Bombay. I felt the surges of pain, love and excitment he portrayed through his cahracters. Loved the book so much that I immediately raced to the store to get his "Red earth and pouring rain" Highly recommend to anyone! I am sure you will enjoy the enigmatic path he paves as much as I did!

A Superb Collection of Contemporary Tales

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.