The Death of Vishnu
by Manil Suri
W. W. Norton

It is unclear whether Vishnu is breathing as he lies unmoving on the first-floor landing of a Bombay apartment building, the stench of his soiled pants rising up the stairwell. Mrs. Asrani stands on the third step above him, his body "aligned with the curve of the stairs." The laces from a pair of sneakers are wrapped around the fingers of one of Vishnu's hands, while the other hand seems to want to claw its way up the stairs. Mrs. Asrani vows not to pay whomever will clean up Vishnu's excrement — and perhaps his body. Yet she uses a scrap of brown paper to fish out a teacup from the mess so that she may bring him a fresh cup of tea, as she has done for the last 11 years.

The opening scene of Manil Suri's first novel "The Death of Vishnu" does a lot of work. Not only does it set in motion the action of the novel, but it establishes the subtle comedy that pervades it. The prose in these opening pages (and throughout most of the book) is exquisitely detailed, and, really, incomparable.

Even though it opens with an image of Vishnu's dead body, the novel is not so much about Vishnu dying as it is about the other characters. It is as if Vishnu is the hub of a wheel, where all the action is happening around him, but would not be occurring if he were not there. Somehow Vishnu's passing sparks a fervor of spiritual questioning and rebellion among the residents of this apartment building in crowded Bombay. And since most of the story takes place in this building, with little movement across geography, the characters take on extra importance; they are responsible for making the novel compelling.

There are four families living in the apartment building: two Hindu families on the first floor, a Muslim family on the second and what appears to be a largely secular widower on the top floor. On the first-floor landing lies the body of Vishnu, an endearing vagrant and thief with the name of a Hindu god. As his spirit rises up the stairwell of the building, its occupants go on a manic and comic search for spiritual meaning and tradition in modern day India.

Most of the characters are obsessed with, or at least overly interested in, the movies. Mr. Taneja, the widower on the top floor, mourns the loss of his wife through a romantic song from a movie. Kavita Asrani, the teenage daughter of Hindu parents, visualizes herself as the heroine of heavily orchestrated romances. Movie culture permeates the atmosphere of Suri's Bombay. As Kavita Asrani wonders whether she should elope with the Muslim boy who lives on the second floor, or adhere to an arranged marriage, Suri's message is clear: tradition in India, especially in cosmopolitan Bombay, is on the wane, and with it goes Indian culture.

Suri's style is lucid, deeply lyrical, and uses a comedic touch to depict the conflict between modern culture and tradition. He illustrates his profound technical and artistic abilities with flashbacks to Vishnu's childhood, rendering them in a beautifully dreamlike present tense. We hear Vishnu's mother, telling him stories of the Hindu gods. We smell the cardamom and clove. We see breasts rising "like moons emerging from a pool."

But it is Suri's ability to infuse his prose with rich allusions to Hindu religion that really carries this novel to a higher level. When Mr. Jalal, who has spent most of the novel shopping around for a religious foundation, begins proselytizing that Vishnu — the dead, soiled alcoholic on the first-floor landing — is really a Hindu god, the comedy is revealing.

"When Mr. Jalal looked back down from the sky, Vishnu's body was metamorphosing. Into something liquid and luminous, that sucked the light from the air and released it back with concentrated intensity. Limbs started appearing from all around Vishnu's perimeter, and at their ends Mr. Jalal saw exquisitely carved conches and fabulous jewel-encrusted maces."

For all of Suri's elegiac flourishes, however, there are structural decisions he should have reconsidered. Mr. Taneja, the lonely, sympathy-inspiring man who lives on the third floor, does not appear until halfway through the novel. He is one of the most appealing characters in the book. It would have been nice to live with him a little longer.

Overall, though, any scene or sentence in "The Death of Vishnu" is worth waiting for. And if "The Death of Vishnu" is any indication, Suri's next novel will be worth waiting for too.

— Ben Welch (bwelch@english.umass.edu)