Vikram Chandra

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Vikram Chandra ( Hindi : विक्रम चन्द्र, vikram candra; born July 23, 1961 in New Delhi ) is an Indian-American author. He was awarded several prestigious prizes on an international level for his short story volume “The Five Pages of Life” and his first novel “Dance of the Gods”. His work is considered world literature in terms of both reception and production history.

life and work

Vikram Chandra was born into a creative family. His mother also worked as a film writer and has written numerous scripts for Hindi films . His sister Tanuja also works as a director, while his other sister Anupama made a name for herself as a film critic and also wrote several books. Vikram himself first attended school in Ajmer , a city in the Indian state of Rajasthan . Then he began studying at St. Xavier's College at the University of Mumbai ( Bombay ), but changed before the end of his studies at the Pomona College of Claremont in California , where he in 1984 his academic degree as a Bachelor of Arts in Creative Writing (Creative Writing) in English with distinction.

He then first attended the film school at Columbia University . There he read the biography of the legendary soldier James Skinner - son of an Indian mother and a British father - and then felt the desire to write a novel himself on the subject.

So he dropped out of film school halfway and sought support at Johns Hopkins University and the University of Houston . In 1995 his first novel Red Earth and Pouring Rain (German title: Tanz der Götter ) appeared, which was received with enthusiasm by international book reviews.

The novel, which is designed as a fictional autobiography, was published simultaneously in India and England and was translated into twelve languages ​​within a very short time; at the same time he received numerous awards worldwide. Appears in the background story narrator Sanjay, one monkey type in contemporary India reincarnated embodies poets of the 19th century. He tells (to) his life in order to prevent the death god Yama from pushing him back into the unconsciousness of reincarnation in the form of an animal.

This conception of the plot enables Chandra to interweave the public with the private in the life of Sanjay and his companions in the history of India and Great Britain in the 18th and 19th centuries as well as in contemporary history of America and India in an opulent form. There are numerous intertextual allusions and quotations in the novel ; besides excerpts from Sanskrit - epics like Mahabharata are texts from the stories of the Arabian Nights to Rudyard Kipling's Kim and Jorge Luis Borges ' El Inmortal (dt. The Immortal ) included. The title of this novel goes back to a poem from classical Tamil ; With regard to language, motifs , history and mythology , Chandra succeeds in integrating western and Indian moments in his narrative work. In doing so, he continues a tradition of internationalizing Indian literature in the English language, which began in the 1980s and was decisively influenced by renowned authors such as Salman Rushdie .

In terms of production aesthetics, Chandra's works are located in the context of magic realism . As is characteristic of postmodernism as a whole, the reliability of epistemological processes or activities and, as a result, the categories of identity and history are questioned, but at the same time a trust in the written word and in the reconciling power of storytelling are expressed. The Scheherazade motif, which Chandra also took up in Red Earh and Pouring Rain , can be understood as paradigmatic in this regard .

Chandra's 1997 book Love and Longing in Bombay (English title: The Five Sides of Life , 1999) was showered with praise by the critics. In this sequence of stories, the spectrum of which extends from the detective story to the ghost story, the longings and relationships of the urban individual are essentially thematized; The framework plot here has the narrative function of taking up and continuing the tradition of (oral) storytelling, which is rooted in Indian culture up to the present day. The titles of the stories " Dharma ", " Shakti ", " Kama ", " Artha " and " Shanti " are apparently arranged by Chandra in this order as quite characteristic of his work and represent significant concepts of Hindu philosophy.

After initially co-authoring a Bollywood production, Chandra published his last novel Sacred Games in 2006 , which was published in German in two parts, but also in one volume in 2008 (under the title The Godfather of Bombay ) has been published. Sacred Games received the Hutch Crossword Book Award in 2006 and the Salon Book Award in 2007 , followed by a Netflix adaptation of the same name in 2018 .

Vikram Chandra is married to the author Melanie Abrams and spends his time alternately in Mumbai and Oakland . Both he and his wife have taught creative writing at the University of California since 2005 .

Works

Books

  • Red Earth and Pouring Rain . 1995
    • Dance of the gods . German translation by Ulrike Seeberger. Aufbau-Verlag, Berlin 1997, ISBN 978-3-351-02832-9
  • Love and Longing in Bombay . 1997
    • The five sides of life. Bombay stories . German translation by Ulrike Seeberger. Aufbau-Verlag, Berlin 1999, ISBN 978-3-351-02856-5
  • Sacred Games . 2006
    • The god of Bombay . 1st part in the German translation by Barbara Heller and Kathrin Razum . Aufbau-Verlag, Berlin 2006, ISBN 978-3-351-03091-9
    • Bombay Paradise . 2nd part in the German translation by Barbara Heller and Kathrin Razum. Aufbau-Verlag, Berlin 2006, ISBN 978-3-351-03092-6
    • The godfather of Bombay . German translation by Barbara Heller and Kathrin Razum. Aufbau-Verlag, Berlin 2008, ISBN 978-3-7466-2483-9
  • Geek Sublime: Writing Fiction, Coding Software . Faber and Faber. 2013.

Scripts

Awards

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ See Ursula Dora Kienzle: Chandra, Vikram. In: Metzler Lexicon of English-Speaking Authors . 631 portraits - from the beginning to the present. Edited by Eberhard Kreutzer and Ansgar Nünning, Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2002, ISBN 3-476-01746-X , 666 pages (special edition Stuttgart / Weimar 2006, ISBN 978-3-476-02125-0 ), p. 108 .
  2. ↑ See the press release from the University of California, Berkeley of December 7, 2005 on UC Berkeley lecturer Vikram Chandra: From "weird little kid" in India to master storyteller - and winner of a publishing jackpot . Retrieved July 26, 2018.
  3. ↑ See the press release from the University of California, Berkeley of December 7, 2005 on UC Berkeley lecturer Vikram Chandra: From "weird little kid" in India to master storyteller - and winner of a publishing jackpot . Retrieved July 26, 2018.
  4. ↑ See Ursula Dora Kienzle: Chandra, Vikram. In: Metzler Lexicon of English-Speaking Authors . 631 portraits - from the beginning to the present. Edited by Eberhard Kreutzer and Ansgar Nünning, Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2002, ISBN 3-476-01746-X , 666 pages (special edition Stuttgart / Weimar 2006, ISBN 978-3-476-02125-0 ), p. 108 .
  5. ↑ See Ursula Dora Kienzle: Chandra, Vikram. In: Metzler Lexicon of English-Speaking Authors . 631 portraits - from the beginning to the present. Edited by Eberhard Kreutzer and Ansgar Nünning, Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2002, ISBN 3-476-01746-X , 666 pages (special edition Stuttgart / Weimar 2006, ISBN 978-3-476-02125-0 ), p. 108 .
  6. ↑ See Ursula Dora Kienzle: Chandra, Vikram. In: Metzler Lexicon of English-Speaking Authors . 631 portraits - from the beginning to the present. Edited by Eberhard Kreutzer and Ansgar Nünning, Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2002, ISBN 3-476-01746-X , 666 pages (special edition Stuttgart / Weimar 2006, ISBN 978-3-476-02125-0 ), p. 108 .
  7. ↑ Cf. the press release of the University of California, Berkeley of December 7, 2005 on UC Berkeley lecturer Vikram Chandra: From "weird little kid" in India to master storyteller - and winner of a publishing jackpot as well as the information in Oakland Magazine from 1. July 2013 A Literary Marriage . Retrieved July 26, 2018.
personal data
SURNAME Chandra, Vikram
ALTERNATIVE NAMES चन्द्र, विक्रम (Hindi)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Indian writer
DATE OF BIRTH July 23, 1961
PLACE OF BIRTH New Delhi