The Death Of Vishnu

In the first book of Manil Suri’s three-volume series The Hindu Gods, an ordinary man slips beyond this world as all around him life continues.

Vishnu, the odd-job man in a Bombay apartment block, lies dying on the staircase landing. Around him the lives of the apartment dwellers unfold - the warring housewives on the first floor, the lovesick teenagers on the second, and the widower, alone and quietly grieving at the top of the building. In a fevered state, Vishnu looks back on his love affair with the seductive Padmini and comedy becomes tragedy as his life draws to a close.

"[A] deft and confident first novel. . . . The Death of Vishnu reminds me of the work of an earlier writer, the deliberately modest and beautifully constructed novels of R. K. Narayan. . . . the finely burnished plots, the oblique irony and understated prose; above all, the sense of equipoise. All this The Death of Vishnu has, and more."  -  Michael Gorra, New York Times Book Review

"Vivid and engrossing. . . . Though the book is anchored, fascinatingly, in the daily life of Bombay, the depth of Suri's characters lifts The Death of Vishnu out of its sociological and cultural background, takes it beyond the confines of its particular setting, and raises it into a work of fiction that seems not only universal but absolutely cosmic."  -  Francine Prose, Elle

Manil Suriis a distinguished mathematics professor at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Author of three acclaimed novels, including The Death of Vishnu, he is a former contributing opinion writer at the New York Times, for which he has written several widely read pieces on mathematics.