The+Death+of+Vishnu+by+Manil+Suri

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=Book Summary= 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. Suri 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 country, the oppressive heat, the mixture of superstitions and religious fanaticism, the social cruelty, permeate 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.)// -- //Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.//

=About the Author=

Manil Suri was born and raised in Bombay (now Mumbai), India. He came to the United States as a student when he was twenty. He lives in Silver Spring, Maryland (when not visiting Mumbai) and is a citizen of both the United States and India. Suri’s first published fiction in English was //The Seven Circles//, a short story that appeared in //The New Yorker// on Valentine’s Day, 2000. //The Death of Vishnu//, his first novel, debuted worldwide in India on January 6, 2001. In addition to being published by W. W. Norton in the United States and Bloomsbury in the UK, the novel has been translated into twenty-two foreign languages. Suri was named by //Time// magazine as a “Person to Watch” in 2000, and he received a Guggenheim Fellowship for fiction in 2004. “Writing //The Death of Vishnu// led me to Hindu mythology and to the great philosophical works of India like the Bhagwad Gita,” Suri says. “It helped me reconnect with a spiritual side of myself that had been dormant for a long time.” Working on //The Age of Shiva// was also a voyage of discovery. In addition to being a writer, Suri is also a mathematician. He obtained his PhD in applied mathematics from Carnegie-Mellon University and is a tenured full professor in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC). = = =Possible Discussion Questions=
 * 1. || Compare Manil Suri to other Indian novelists writing in English. In what ways does he use similar devices and tropes as Salman Rushdie or Arundhati Roy? In what ways is his writing unique? ||
 * 2. || Which characters did you find the most compelling? The least? ||
 * 3. || //The Death of Vishnu// is envisioned by Suri as the first part of a trilogy. Did it feel like the beginning of a larger work? Were there, for example, issues that remained unresolved at its end? ||
 * 4. || Considerations of space figure prominently in the novel. Whether it’s the landing that is Vishnu’s “home” or the running dispute between the Pathaks and the Asranis over their shared kitchen, there is a constant feeling that no one has enough room. What do you make of this, especially in light of the fact that Suri has described his novel, at least on one level, as a socio-political allegory for India? ||
 * 5. || Vishnu is, it seems, an odd mix of power and powerlessness. In Mr. Jalal’s vision he crushes helpless people in his many mouths, but in ascending the steps, he cannot even crush an ant. What are we to make of this incongruity? ||
 * 6. || Discuss the place of food in the novel (mangoes, tea biscuits, bananas) and its relationship to memory and emotion. ||
 * 7. || Vishnu’s progress up the stairs and his series of transformations is set against the daily lives of the apartment’s inhabitants, lives characterized by a lack of progress, by a stultifying stasis, where dreams of upward mobility in a material sense are always disappointed. What do you make of this juxtaposition? ||
 * 8. || In a book that is interwoven with and undergirded by a sort of Hindu teleology, what place do the Jalals, a family of Muslims, occupy? ||
 * 9. || Also, if the apartment building functions as a sort of microcosm for the ethno-political map of India, what does it mean that the Jalals end up as they do: each member of the family either beaten or abandoned, all of them lost in some way or another? ||
 * 10. || Along with functioning as a metaphor for India, The Death of Vishnu is, according to Suri, a sort of Hindu allegory, with Vishnu tracing the path of the soul in his ascent of the building steps. What do you think each of the apartments is meant to represent? ||
 * 11. || Running through the novel there is the fabric of Hindu mythology, but there is also, it seems, another : movimythologyes. Several of the characters see their lives through the lens of Bombay cinema. What is the relationship between these two religions, one sacred, one profane? How does each pervade the other? Discuss, for example, Suri’s use of colors or Vishnu’s vision, near the end of the novel of his own life as a movie. ||
 * 12. || What are we to make of the last scene of the novel, with the impish, blue-tinged boy? ||