Details Books As Red Earth and Pouring Rain

Original Title:	Red Earth and Pouring Rain
ISBN:	0316132934 (ISBN13: 9780316132930)
Edition Language:	English
Literary Awards:	World Fantasy Award Nominee for Best Novel (1996), Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best First Book Overall (1996), David Higham Prize for Fiction (1995)

Red Earth and Pouring Rain Paperback | Pages: 542 pages

List Containing Books Red Earth and Pouring Rain

Title	:	Red Earth and Pouring Rain
Author	:	Vikram Chandra
Book Format	:	Paperback
Book Edition	:	First Edition
Pages	:	Pages: 542 pages
Published	:	March 1st 1997 by Back Bay Books (first published 1995)
Categories	:	Fiction. Cultural. India. Fantasy. Magical Realism. Asian Literature. Indian Literature. Literature

Narration Toward Books Red Earth and Pouring Rain

The main things this book had going for it:
• Stories within stories within stories. You might get lost like I did, but I found I didn’t really care about what level I was in as long as the stories kept unrolling and enrapturing me;
• Beautiful, vivid and lyrical language: descriptive, character-illuminating, sometimes philosophical;
• A typewriting monkey! I mean, a TYPEWRITING MONKEY!

So the stories -- lots of stories -– form a Scheherazade-style framework with the monkey telling tales to both visiting gods and townspeople to save his own life: tales of romance, adventure, war, family, love, birth, death, and growing up, the magical and the mundane, from 18th century India to 1980s California. The framework around the stories, each of which has its own conflict and arc, has a conflict of its own, the challenge every storyteller has: to keep his audience intrigued. Or else.

Today the television cameras came, and also the death threats. We have been warned by several organizations that the storytelling must stop. The groups on the very far right – of several religions – object to the ‘careless use of religious symbology, and the ceaseless insults to the sensitivities of the devout.’ The far-left parties object to the sensationalization and falsification of history, and the pernicious Western influences on our young.’ Everyone objects to the sex, except the audience.

We have become a national issue. Questions have been raised in parliament. Sir Patanjali Abhishek Vardarajan, the grand old man of Indian science, has offered a reward of fifty thousand rupees to ‘anyone who can demonstrate the existence of a typing monkey under laboratory conditions.’ . . .

‘We will not be bullied,’ Saira said. “Type on.’

I was almost a hundred pages into this before I learned that Chandra had studied writing with John Barth at Johns Hopkins. Well, no wonder I was loving it. This has the same sort of sprawling scope and playful tone as many of Barth’s longer works, blending the mythical, historical and the everyday in a similar fashion. It’s certainly not on a level in terms of prose or structure, of course, but it’s still awfully good. And once I knew the connection, I could plainly see the master’s fingerprints, the DNA is there.

I’m not going to lie to you. I didn’t enjoy every page of this. Sometimes the epic battle scenes were too detailed and the play-by-play of a cricket match left me restless and skimming. But then, I’m such a girl, I don’t enjoy war and sports that much. However, most of it was delightful.

So there are stories within stories, which are also stories about stories. There’s a reverence for storytelling that permeates the whole, with the frequent interjection:

“Listen . . . . “

And we do.

Rating Containing Books Red Earth and Pouring Rain

Ratings: 3.79 From 2476 Users | 222 Reviews

Judge Containing Books Red Earth and Pouring Rain

A young man returns to India after going to college in Los Angeles. While tangled in a web of identity issues, the young man shoots a monkey that had stolen his levis ( symbolism anyone?). This is a big no-no in their neck of the woods and the young man's family rushes to save the monkey.While nursing the monkey back to health, it becomes clear that the shooting had flipped a switch in the monkey that allows him to remember his past life as a poet. The monkey proceeds to climb up to the

The multiple stories in this truly epic novel make it a hard one to follow yet even h arder to put down. For a westerner quite unfamiliar with Indian culture, I was constnatly researching India's history, language, cuisine, gods, castes, and religion as I moved through this story. However - it was brilliant. The time spent researching to understand was quite worth it, and the information I gained in the process I should have already had. The story is brilliant, told for the most part by an

Damn



Fascinating! And dense with characters and events. I found it a bit hard to follow -- so many characters, some mythical, and the writing is rich with detail of all kinds. It's a story of stories, narrated mostly by a god-like monkey who used to be human. I'd like to read it again sometime, as I was less confused after reading half the book and I'd get more out of it the second time. This author has boundless imagination! I couldn't tell how much was historical, if any. It's a complex book and

Very few other books have made me want to write poetry or tell a story of my own as badly as this one. The novel takes us across multiple points in space and time, as we are immersed in layer after layer of its deep interwoven story lines. The prose is rich and reads like a fine poem, taking us back to India's colonial past, while flitting occasionally back to the present to tie the two eras together. This is a story very much about the identity of the Indian individual as much as it is about

Red Earth and Pouring Rain is an epic tale about the power and necessity of storytelling. In its tales within tales, we experience how the story forms us and maintains us, while it carries time, history and the hopes of the future. Beneath the beautifully and powerfully rendered tales with characters as unexpected as Hanuman and Jack the Ripper lies the magic of myth; the cycles of birth, death and rebirth; the clash of beliefs; and the contradictions of our humanity which lead us, generation