Author: Vikram Chandra
Publisher: Penguin
Year: 2001
Language: English
Pages: 520
ISBN/UPC (if available): 0140246126
Description
This is a new 2001 edition.
In Vikram Chandra's astonishing first novel, the gods Hanuman, Ganesha and Yama descend on a house in an Indian city to vie for the soul of a wounded monkey. A bargain is struck: the monkey must tell a story, and if he can keep his audience entertained, he shall live. The result is Red Earth and Pouring Rain, a tale of nineteenth century India: of Sanjay, a poet, and Sikander, a warrior; of hoofbeats thundering through the streets of Calcutta and the birth of a luminous child; of great wars and love affairs and a city gone 'mad with poetry'. And woven into this tapestry of stories is a second, totally modem narrative, the adventures of a young Indian criss-crossing America in a car with his friends and his eventual return to his homeland.
Media Reviews
'Chandra's writing - tender, funny, incandescent - so animates his subjects that it becomes possible to see through other eyes, to sense another culture...' -Elizabeth Young in the Guardian
'Vikram Chandra's first novel makes its British counterparts look like apologetic throat-clearings. Verbally lithe, astute, marvellously vivid, it brings the Indian gods into compelling play with our solid strivings, where telling a story-hundreds of them-becomes its own life-preserving act.'
-Adam Thorpe
'Vikram Chandra is beginning his writing life already a master.' - John Hawkes
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