Publisher's Weekly Review
Visualizing a village, a hotel or an apartment building as a microcosm of society is not a new concept to writers, but few have invested their fiction with such luminous language, insight into character and grasp of cultural construct as Suri does in his debut. The inhabitants of a small apartment building in Bombay are motivated by concerns ranging from social status to spiritual transcendence while their alcoholic houseboy, Vishnu, lies dying on the staircase landing. During a span of 24 hours, Vishnu's body becomes the fulcrum for a series of crises, some tragic, some farcical, that reflect both the folly and nobility of human conduct. To the perpetually quarreling first-floor tenants, Mrs. Pathak and Mrs. Asrani, Vishnu is a recipient of grudging charity and casual calumny; each justifies her refusal to pay for his hospitalization. Though locked in perpetual bickering, the women are united in their prejudice against their upstairs neighbors, the Jahals, who are Muslims. While Mr. Jahal seeks to test his intellectual agnosticism by seeking spiritual enlightenment, his son, Samil, and the Asranis' spoiled, willful daughter, Kavita, prepare to defy their families by running away together. On the third floor, reclusive widower Vinod Taneja still mourns his young wife, Sheetal; their story of tentative love blossoming into deep devotion and truncated by early death is an exquisite cameo of a marital relationship. Interspersed are Vishnu's lyrically rendered thoughts as his soul leaves his body and begins a slow ascent of the apartment stairs, rising through the stages of existence as he relives memories of his gentle mother and his passion for the prostitute Padmina. Suril has a discerning eye for human foibles, an empathetic knowledge of domestic interaction and an instinctive understanding of the caste-nuanced traditions of Indian society. The excesses of life in that countryDthe oppressive heat, the mixture of superstitions and religious fanaticism, the social crueltyDpermeate the atmospheric narrative. By turns charming and funny, searing and poignant, dramatic and farcical, this fluid novel is an irresistible blend of realism, mysticism and religious metaphor, a parable of the universal conditions of human life. Agent, Nicole Aragi. (Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
Suri, a mathematics professor at the University of Maryland, has entered the realm of literature with assurance, agile humor, and an impressive breadth of social and religious concerns. His first novel, set in Bombay, the city of his birth, conjures a beehive-busy microcosm within the walls of an apartment building. Two Hindu families bicker about water and ghee; a Muslim household is pitched into confusion when its mild-mannered patriarch turns fanatic in his pursuit of enlightenment; a Hindu girl and Muslim boy imagine that they're in love; and Vishnu, the drunk who sleeps on the first-floor landing, drifts peacefully toward death. As he lies dreaming about love, his childhood, and his divine namesake, his neighbors fret over their tired marriages, knotty questions of status and faith, and responsibility for Vishnu. The gospel of the movies is just as influential as the Koran and the Bhagavad Gita in Suri's tenderly comic, wryly metaphysical, and hugely entertaining tale, in which profound longings for romance and deliverance shape even the most modest (perhaps the most precious) of lives. Donna Seaman
Kirkus Review
Indian-born Suris imaginative first novel, set in and near a volatile Bombay apartment building, employs the figure of a drunken handyman as the catalyst for a linked series of charmingly improbable seriocomic catastrophes. The eponymous Vishnu lies crumpled in a stuporous heap on a landing just outside his door. Scandalized neighbors throw covers over his offending carcass, checking occasionally for a pulse, or telltale snores. The life of the building at first proceeds pretty much as always: fastidious Mrs. Asrani and stolid Mrs. Pathak bicker over privileges abused in their communal kitchen, while their weary husbands attempt to keep the peace. Snooty Mrs. Jaiswal disapproves of everybody; reclusive widower Mr. Taneja warily emerges from his shell; devout Mrs. Jalal fears for her unbeliever husband Ahmeds souland really despairs when Ahmed envisions Vishnu in the figure of his namesake deity (with fire and smoke, and more heads than I could count). Furthermore, the Jalals gorgeous daughter Kavati plans to elude an arranged marriage by eloping with the Asranis prematurely jaded son Salimunless she becomes a film star instead. Meanwhile, Vishnus disorderly dreams revisit his chaotic past (notably his obsession with Padmini, a dictatorial prostitute with expensive tastes), and extend to a delirium presumably derived from half-overheard conversations: he decides he has become the god Vishnu. This transformation creates insoluble problems when his neighbors finally call an ambulance to remove him, and the slumberer becomes the last of Vishnus traditional avatars: Kalki the destroyer. Suri plots it all beautifully, and his suggestible characters varied eccentricities and delusions are often very funny indeed. But the crazy-quilt inner life of (the mortal) Vishnu seems essentially unrelated to their lives, as if it belongs to another novel that Suri hasnt yet written. An amalgam of early Naipaul and R.K. Narayan, with just a whiff of Kosinskis Being There. A highly likable, if oddly conceived and assembled, debut novel. Author tour
Library Journal Review
In this debut, mathematics professor Suri introduces us to the varied denizens of an apartment building where Vishnu lies dyingÄas neighbors argue about paying for the ambulance. Expect big promotion. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
