Samrat Upadhyay

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Samrat Upadhyay is a Nepalese writer, writing in English. He has been called "the first Nepali-born fiction writer writing in English to be published in the West"[1]. He was born and raised in Kathmandu, Nepal, and came to the United States at the age of twenty-one. He lives with his wife and daughter in Bloomington, Indiana (United States), where he is Professor of Creative Writing at Indiana University. His books specially portray the current situation in Nepal.

Mr. Upadhyay notably features all about Nepal's crisis. He certainly gives a realistic look regarding the current situation in Nepal though his works are entirely fictional. But he is known to add unreal and unacceptable approximation for he wrote the books while in the US. He presents the Maoist insurgency in a completely different way. He is known to have become famous by his books and stories due to the beginning of a new wave in writing about Nepal.

According to the San Francisco Chronicle, Upadhyay is "like a Buddhist Chekhov".[2].


Contents

[edit] Bibliography

[edit] Arresting God in Kathmandu (2001)

First published by Houghton Mifflin Company in 2001, Arresting God in Kathmandu is Upadhyay's first book. It is a collection of nine short stories. With Arresting God in Kathmandu Upadhyay won the Whiting Writers' Award.

"From the first Nepali author writing in English to be published in the West, Arresting God in Kathmandu brilliantly explores the nature of desire and spirituality in a changing society. With the assurance and unsentimental wisdom of a long-established writer, Upadhyay records the echoes of modernization throughout love and family. Here are husbands and wives bound together by arranged marriages but sometimes driven elsewhere by an intense desire for connection and transcedence. In an city where gods are omnipresent, where privacy is elusive and family defines identity, these men and women find themselves at the mercy of their desires but at will of their society. Psychologically rich and astonishing acute, Arresting God in Kathmandu introduces a potent new voice in contemporary fiction."[3]

The stories
1. The Good Shopkeeper
2. The Cooking Poet
3. Deepak Misra's Secretary
4. The Limping Bride
5. During the Festival
6. The Room Next Door
7. The Man with Long Hair
8. This World
9. A Great Man's House

Praises
"Subtle and spiritually complex... Mr. Upadhyay's stories bring us into contact with a world that is somehow both very far away and very familiar."
--New York Times[4]

"Startlingly good. Upadhyay has mastered the short fictional genre with such humanity and apparent ease that he reminds one of Chekhov - though a Buddhist Chekhov who writes about love not with dark Russian fatalism but with a sense of cyclical nature of live and its passions... He has created a story collection that reconfirms the strength of literature from the subcontinent and indicates that Buddhist philosophy and short fiction make for an interesting twenty-first-century English marriage."
--San Francisco Chronicle[4]

"Upadhyay combines exact details of plot and setting with a reflective tone and his stories have been burnished until they glow with visual and emotional precision."
--Washington Post Book World[4]

"Signals the arrival of a major new talent. A terrific book, full of tenderness, compassion and rare insight."
--Amitav Ghosh[4]

"Upadhyay invites us to participate in intense passions of quirky and imaginative individuals and couples in these wonderful stories full of irony, compassion, wisdom, and wit. Read him and you learn about Nepal as well as yourself."
--Josip Novakovic[4]

"These stories break in the heart and fill the mind because they are so marvelously shrewd in craft and because Mr. Upadhyay is unafraid of the harde truths no amount of distance can dull - not because, es exotica, they take place in a world alien to the parochial kind we are. Arresting God in Kathmandu is fiction that haunts as much as it instructs. Next, please turn Mr. Upadhyay loose to go hunting for God in the equally needy provinces of his new homeland."
--Lee K. Abbott[3]

"With a masterful narrative style, fascinating characterizations, and precise description, Samrat Upadhyay shows us compelling clashes of the spiritual versus the temporal and carnal. This is a distinguished and captivating book."
--Ian MacMillan[3]


[edit] The Guru of Love (2003)

First published by Houghton Mifflin Company in 2003, The Guru of Love is Upadhyay's second book and first full length novel. The Guru of Love was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year 2003.

"From the Acclaimed author of Arresting God in Kathmandu comes this engrossing story of love and loss in contemporary Nepal. The Guru of Love is a moving and important story - important for what it illuminates about the human need to love as well as lust, and for the light it shines on the political situation in Nepal and elsewhere.
Ramchandra is a math teacher earning a low wage and living in a small apartment in Kathmandu with his wife and two children. Moon-lightning as a tutor, he engages in an illicit affair with one of his tutees, Malati, a beautiful, impoverished young woman who is also a new mother. She provides for him what his wife, who comes from a privileged background, does not: desire, mystery, and the beauty of a simpler life. Not surprisingly, the affair soon upends Ramchandra's family, and he learns that he knows far less about his wife - and about himself - than he thought.
Complicating matters is Kathmandu itself, a small city bursting with the conflicts of modernization, a static government, and a changing population. Just as Kathmandu must contain its growing needs, so must Ramchandra learn to accommodate both tradition and his very modern desires. Absolutely absorbing yet deceptively simple, this novel brims with psychological acuity and a rich sense of the connection between spirituality and sensuality. It also cements Upadhyay's emerging status as one of our most exciting new writers."[5]

Praises
"Mr. Upadhyay's novel picked me up by the scruff of my neck, shook me a bit, and then hurled me into a world as lovely and emotional as anything I have experienced inside a book in recent years."
--Akhil Sharma[4]

"Unsentimental, full of details that seem to combust completely. His delicate realism helps us recognize, with compassion and awareness, the stories and feelings of which our own lives are composed. Fiction doesn't get much better than this."
--Kate wheeler[4]

"Utterly absorbing... Upadhyay's lucent and tender storytelling gently unveils the strange interplay between self and family, the private and the political, and most mysteriously, the erotic and the spiritual."
--Booklist, starred review[4]


[edit] The Royal Ghosts (2006)

First published by Houghton Mifflin Company in 2006, The Royal Ghosts is Upadhyay's third book, a collection of nine short stories.

"With emotional precision and narrative subtlety, The Royal Ghosts features characters trying to reconcile their true desires with the forces at work in Nepali society. Against the backdrop of the violent Maoist insurgencies that have claimed thousands of lives, these characters struggle with their duties to their aging parents, an oppressive caste system, and the complexities of arranged marriage. In the end, they manage to find peace and connection, often where they least expect it - with the people directly in front of them. These stories brilliantly examine not only Kathmandu during a time of political crisis and cultural transformation but also the effects of that city on the individual consciousness."[4]

The stories
1. A Refugee
2. The Wedding Hero
3. The Third Stage
4. Supreme Pronouncements
5. The Weight of a Gun
6. Chintamani's Women
7. Father, Daughter
8. A Servant in the City
9. The Royal Ghosts

Praises
"Like William Trevor, Samrat Upadhyay compresses into a short story the breadth of vision and human consequence we expect of a novel, and he does so in a prose that seems as natural as breathing. If there were an author of the universe who bestowed on us the tender regard that Upadyay bestows on hus struggling people, we would be blessed indeed."
--Scott Tussel Saunders, author of A Private History of Awe[4]

"Elegant, rich, and pleasing, the stories of The Royal Ghosts will haunt readers long after the book is finished. These are tales of both the inidivual and the society, conveying a measured, transcendental gaze at the nature of the world."
--Diana Abu-Jaber, author of The Language of Baklava[4]


[edit] References

  1. ^ http://www.indiana.edu/~mfawrite/upadhyay.html
  2. ^ http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/chronicle/archive/2001/08/26/RV200183.DTL
  3. ^ a b c Upadhyay, Samrat (2006). Arresting God in Kathmandu. Daryaganj, New Delhi, India: Rupa. ISBN 81-7167-803-3. 
  4. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k Upadhyay, Samrat (2006). The Royal Ghosts. Daryaganj, New Delhi, India: Rupa. ISBN 81-291-0915-8. 
  5. ^ Upadhyay, Samrat (2003). The Guru of Love. Daryaganj, New Delhi, India: Rupa. ISBN 0-618-24727-0.