The Death of Vishnu

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Vishnu, the odd-job man in a Mumbai apartment block, lies dying on the staircase landing. In his fevered state, he looks back on his love affair with the seductive Padmini while all around him is played out the drama of the apartment-block dwellers: Mrs Pathak and Mrs Asrani’s ferocious bickering over their shared kitchen; Vinod Taneja obsessively playing his dead wife’s favourite album; Mr Jalal dreaming of a path to enlightenment while his son Salim plots a film-style elopement with the daughter of the Asranis downstairs. Then to ignite this mix of social and religious differences comes Mr Jalal’s pronouncement that Vishnu is no ordinary man... Blending acutely observed social detail with a dash of Bollywood sparkle, The Death of Vishnu is a breathtaking debut. Manil Suri's The Death of Vishnu should be read for the unalloyed pleasure of delving into a world that is so very familiar to many of us—a world of everyday problems, of characters who are much like us and our neighbours and perhaps we see that amalgamated somewhere in the muddle and blunder of middle class living, life's larger tragedies and ironies are played out. One of the great strengths of this novel is the very effective characterization of people who are, in some ways, intensely ordinary and yet in many ways unique and memorable. ‘A man named Vishnu lies dying on the staircase of a Mumbai apartment building... Manil Suri has created an intimate and intricate portrait of life in this metropolis.’—Vikram Chandra ‘Vibrantly alive, beautifully written, full of wonderfully rich and deeply human characters...Brings to mind...Flaubert and Flannery O’Connor.’ —Michael Cunningham '... It is just a comic novel about people in a building—fighting and so on. On another level, it is a metaphor for India, with all its class and religious differences, it doesn't have to be India, it could be the whole world, people fighting with each other over various differences. On the third level, it is a novel about the spiritual ascension of mankind, just getting more and more detached and inward-looking and it is a parable for man's quest for that...' —The Hindu, New Delhi 'The novel concentrates on the mundane activities of the Mumbai apartment dwellers. The microcosmic becomes the analogue of the everlasting recurrent macrocosmic life. The author has very succinctly captured themyriad colours of the cosmopolitan city sprinkled with references to the old heroes and heroines of Bollywood and echoes of Vividh Bharathi programmes. A bold and successful attempt to capture an intimate portrait of life in the metropolis illuminating the hypocrisy and callousness of the residents of apartments. The novel also displays the kind of emancipated vision, which suggests genre-writing has no necessary ideological entailments, sexual or otherwise.'—Deccan Herald, Bangalore