Ravan and Eddie

Kiran Nagarkar

dec 2012 · New York Review of Books

Over dit e-boek

Ravan and Eddie are the unlikeliest of companions. For one thing, Ravan is Hindu, while Eddie is Catholic. For another, when Ravan was a baby and fell from a balcony, that fall had a dramatic, and very literal, impact on Eddie’s family. But Ravan and Eddie both live in Central Works Department Chawl No. 17—and if you grow up in the crowded Mumbai chawls, you get to participate in your neighbors' lives, whether you like it or not.
 
As we watch the two unlikely heroes of Kiran Nagarkar's acclaimed novel rocket out of the starting blocks of their lives, leaving earth-mothers and absentee fathers, cataclysms and rock ’n’ roll in their wake, we're compelled to sit up and take notice.
 
Recently selected by The Guardian as one of the ten best novels about Mumbai, Ravan and Eddie is a comic masterpiece about two larger- and truer-than-life characters and their bawdy, Rabelaisian adventures in postcolonial India. It is also a timeless journey of self-discovery, a quest for the meaning of guilt and responsibility, sin and sex, crime and punishment.

Over de auteur

Kiran Nagarkar is one of the most significant writers of postcolonial India. His first novel, Saat Sakkam Trechalis translated into English as Seven Sixes are Forty-Three, was quickly recognized as one of the most significant novels ever written in Marathi. His subsequent novels include Ravan and Eddie and Cuckold, which won the Indian Academy of Letters (Sahitya Akademi) Award for best novel and which Gore Vidal called "a fascinating book, a sort of fantastic marriage between the Thomas Mann of Royal Highness and the Lady Murasaki." His most recent works are God’s Little Soldier and The Extras, a sequel to Ravan and Eddie. His books have been translated into many languages. Apart from his work as a novelist, Nagarkar has written plays and screenplays, and is a literary and social critic. He has been awarded many prestigious international fellowships, the most recent of which was a Fulbright appointment at Ithaca College, New York. He currently lives in Mumbai