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Did anyone read Ravan & Eddie Book by Kiran Nagarkar


Beardman

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@3$%

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.

PRAISE

Wicked, magical, hilarious, enduring: A masterpiece from one of world literature’s great cult writers.
—Katherine Boo, author of Behind the Beautiful Forevers

The novel, recently named by the Guardian one of the ten best books about Mumbai, centers on two boys: Ravan, a Hindu, and Eddie, a Roman Catholic, who grow up on different floors of a crowded chawl housing unit, and whose lives are serendipitously linked from infancy. Nagarkar chronicles the boys’ comic and ribaldrous coming-of-age adventures in post-colonial India, and punctuates his story digressions on a selection of lively subjects, from Hindi romantic comedies to skin-lightening creams.
—“Page-Turner” blog, The New Yorker

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