Love and Longing in Bombay: Stories (ISBN 0316133078)

Amazon.com Review:
Welcome to the Fisherman's Rest, a little bar off the Sasoon Dock in Bombay where Mr. Subramaniam spins his tales for a select audience. This is the setting for Vikram Chandra's collection of seven short stories, Love and Longing in Bombay, and Subramaniam is Chandra's Scheherezade. In these stories, Chandra has covered the gamut of genres: there is a ghost story, a love story, a murder mystery, and a crime story, each tale joined to the others by the voice of the elusive narrator. In "Shakti," a discussion about real estate leads to the story of a soldier who must exorcise a ghostly child from his family home. In the final story, "Shanti," a young woman's despair about the state of the country becomes a springboard for a tale of love and hope. Love and Longing in Bombay is a mesmerizing collection, filled with fully rounded characters and stories that resonate long after the book is back on the shelf. Chandra's prose is luminous, his tales satisfying. Scheherezade would be impressed.

A masterpiece of, and on, storytelling:
I came to this book by way of its beautiful first story, 'Dharma', which I found in an amazing collection entitled "The Art of Fiction". I was keen to follow up on its companion pieces and I wasn't disappointed. This is a tremendously accomplished work. Five luxuriously paced stories are linked by a clever framing device involving the first-person narrator, Ranjit, and his story-telling acquaintance, Subramaniam. Importantly, the frame neither distances the characters nor undermines the believability of the stories. The people and plots are fully developed and could easily stand alone. Yet together they add up to something more. First and foremost they sum to Bombay: a compelling and intriguing place, it emerges vibrantly as a city shot through with violence, riven with distinctions of religion, ethnicity and class, and haunted by love and desire. In its teeming history, secrecy, abundance and menace, the city becomes an image of the endlessly astonishing possibilities of human encounter. It's a virtuoso performance, in which Chandra shows himself to be both a master storyteller and a master stylist. In addition to a vast imagination and strong lyric gifts, he has the discipline necessary to bring his stories to fruition. What we find at the end is beauty and compassion. For despite an undertow of loneliness and mortality, human moments of epiphany make these stories journeys towards freedom and peace. The telling and hearing of tales, Chandra insists, can heal and exorcize. It's worth noting that the titles - Dharma, Shakti, Kama, Artha, Shanti - remain untranslated. As one critic observed, Chandra belongs to a confident generation of Indian writers in English who feel little compulsion to gloss. On the evidence here, that confidence is more than justified. Readers entranced by the noirish third story, 'Kama', will be happy to hear that the delightful Inspector Sartaj Singh reappears in Chandra's newly released novel, "Sacred Games".

Impressionism in prose:
The eerieness and macabre of Dharma and Shanti (first and last stories in the book) are reminiscent of Saki, the great Hector Hugh Munro. The personality of the protagonist & narrator and how it reveals itself in the end are reminiscent of Yann Martel's classic Life of Pi. The subtle connection between all short stories and yet their aloofness from the theme are reminiscent of Edgar Allan Poe. However, well before this review sounds like a ploy to put Vikram Chandra amongst the greats and this work amongst classics, I must resign that his casual and careless writing style sets it apart from any other. Who says you have to be out of the box to think out of the box. For someone who has formal training in creative writing and teaches it as a professor, Vikram Chandra's style is surprisingly original and open-ended. I did not have any prior expectation from the book and my initial reaction to the book was indifferent-to-negative. The grammar seems to be filled with convolution and localized incorrectness. The selective filtering of important detail is frustrating when it misleads you far beyond any point of easy return. However, the writing style turns out to be quite clever when you start paying close attention and that can be hard when you are reading page after page of prose. The book never obviates this thesis, but Vikram Chandra breaks out the social life of the city into five characteristic components: Dharma (religion), Shakti (power), Kama (sex), Artha (money), Shanti (peace). The stories do not seem to have any direct connection with Bombay, yet they reveal the essence of life in Bombay. It is neither Chandra's methodical construction of dots that connect to give a bigger picture, nor a work of genius broken into jigsaw pieces that all fit together in one coherent truth. Instead the artistry of this book is in its impressionism. The reason why the whole adds up to be more than the sum of its parts is that the parts are beautifully suspended in Bombay's society, painted with the views of a keen observer. It is yours to love, or not.

Great Read if You Need a Long Distraction:
Chandra's Love and Longing in Bombay is a collection of five loosely connected short stories. The titles are in Sanskrit and they are as follows: Dharma (duty), Shakti (creative female power), Kama (desire), Artha (gain), Shanti (peace). I looked it up on an online Sanskrit-English dictionary. They are all told by a retired military man named Mr. Subramaniam to a young, unnamed hotshot in the software business. Though that being said, it is much more than a moral education through story-telling. The writing is beautiful, organic, and expansive. This is a book that you can read purely for its craft, if you're interested in that sort of thing. The prose is thoughtful and powerful. His stories sprawl, I guess like big cats sprawl. It may look elegantly languid, but there's something lurking underneath, a wry sense of humor and the more traditional lurkers (ghosts, gangsters, and lovesick men). My favorite stories were the first Dharma (a ghost story) and Shanti (a sort of courtship of story exchange). My least favorite was Artha, because though acknowledges and emphasizes that not everything ends neatly, the handling of Artha's characters and plot felt more clumsy then his other stories which were neatly plotted (Kama) or seemed to magically fall into place (Shanti and Dharma). In Chandra's 2001 essay titled "The Cult of Authenticity" he does battle with the accusation that since he writes in English his writing is packaged for western consumption. This couldn't be farther from the truth, well because if it was, I shouldn't have to work so hard. Vikram Chandra is not taking us around Bombay in an auto rickshaw labeled "Bombay Tours" with one of those nifty tour guide mikes. Chandra does not take up the mantle of explaining India. If he does anything at all, he's shoved us down a flight of stairs into a murky bar where an old man is telling a young man stories in English, yes, but an Indian English. It is both one of the intrigues and frustrations of this book. A stranger to Indian culture loses out on a lot of the subtext and it's not just foreign words which can be looked up, it's how certain lines are set up. There's the dramatic pause, I can sense it but I don't know what it means. Reading Chandra is a strange experience. While it has those deep underlying "human" themes, a great deal is culturally based. The "Bombay" in Love and Longing in Bombay occupies a central place. And if you don't know Bombay, too bad. It's one of those books that dares you to "keep up, if you can." This is not a book that everyone will love, but it's a book that everyone should try.

Fancy Frosting, Not Much Cake:
The language is flashy and original, but the old-fashioned skills are lacking: the author does not create fully engaging characters, and the plots are weak. Nor, oddly, does he convey the feeling and atmosphere of Bombay. The female characters, especially, are cardboard cutouts -- the lady in the long sex scene is almost a soft-core parody.

Disappointment:
In each of the short stories, I felt like I was reading the beginning of a great story. Then the story would end abruptly, as if the author was running out of time and needed to wrap it up. It had so much potential...