[I4P]≡ PDF Love and Longing in Bombay Vikram Chandra 9780140265729 Books

Love and Longing in Bombay Vikram Chandra 9780140265729 Books

Download As PDF : Love and Longing in Bombay Vikram Chandra 9780140265729 Books

Love and Longing in Bombay Vikram Chandra 9780140265729 Books

I bought Vikram Chandra’s “Love and Longing in Bombay” (1997) after coming across raves for his later novel “Sacred Games” (2007). Chandra’s deep dive into Mumbai’s underworld attracted me, but was I ready for a 992-page epic? I decided to begin with this 268-page collection of long stories and short novellas about Mumbai when it was called Bombay.
Sentence by sentence, Chandra is a prose master. Everything he writes is a pleasure to read but in his quest to avoid stating the obvious he often lost me as his convoluted, evanescent plots unwound. The five stories in “Love and Longing” have one-word titles that are basic Hindu concepts connecting obliquely, if at all, to the stories’ content. For instance, it’s seemingly a fruitless quest, figuring out how “Shanti,” which means inner peace, is an appropriate title for a story about boy meets girl. Turns out near the end that the girl is named Shanti. Perhaps the name is appropriate after all, since the hero starts out feeling “as if he was gone from himself” but eventually achieves contentment.
The hero of “Kama” (which means longing) is an angsty detective named Sartaj with “the smell of hopelessness in my armpits.” As he pursues a murder investigation down the highways and byways of the seedy side of Mumbai, “he could feel its huge life and all its unsolved dead.” After reading all these stories, Chandra’s readers might feel that their guide to Bombay is instead leading them on a blindfold tour of the city’s tortured psyches.


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Love and Longing in Bombay Vikram Chandra 9780140265729 Books Reviews

good.
Just another testimony to the brilliance of Chandra, he draws you into his stories, carries you along for the ride and allows you a tast of the culture and environment of India, excellent book
I read these characters sometime ago. The five chapters "Dharma", "Shakti", "Kama", "Artha" and "Shanti" seemed reasonable means of understanding the authors work. I vaguley remember the story except for the fact that an old man was narrating these stories in a corner of a room or hotel. It is quite a lot about Bombay. One thing for sure, while reading these stories, they do catch your attention. But the endings of these stories were some what disappointing.
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.
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.
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.
Love and Longing in Bombay Stories
This book was the one that introduced me to the gifted Vikram Chandra who I had never heard of. I was favorably impressed by his turn of the prhrase in these marvelous short stories that all come together at the end. I highly recommend it to anyone who likes short stories. This is set in India in the past (early to mid 20th century, I believe), and I have discovered a new love for reading books about India through this book. Buy it. You won't be disappointed. I've since bought other books by Vikram Chandra and he's a great author. You won't be disappointed.
I bought Vikram Chandra’s “Love and Longing in Bombay” (1997) after coming across raves for his later novel “Sacred Games” (2007). Chandra’s deep dive into Mumbai’s underworld attracted me, but was I ready for a 992-page epic? I decided to begin with this 268-page collection of long stories and short novellas about Mumbai when it was called Bombay.
Sentence by sentence, Chandra is a prose master. Everything he writes is a pleasure to read but in his quest to avoid stating the obvious he often lost me as his convoluted, evanescent plots unwound. The five stories in “Love and Longing” have one-word titles that are basic Hindu concepts connecting obliquely, if at all, to the stories’ content. For instance, it’s seemingly a fruitless quest, figuring out how “Shanti,” which means inner peace, is an appropriate title for a story about boy meets girl. Turns out near the end that the girl is named Shanti. Perhaps the name is appropriate after all, since the hero starts out feeling “as if he was gone from himself” but eventually achieves contentment.
The hero of “Kama” (which means longing) is an angsty detective named Sartaj with “the smell of hopelessness in my armpits.” As he pursues a murder investigation down the highways and byways of the seedy side of Mumbai, “he could feel its huge life and all its unsolved dead.” After reading all these stories, Chandra’s readers might feel that their guide to Bombay is instead leading them on a blindfold tour of the city’s tortured psyches.