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Nirshan Perera
Hailing his first literary endeavor as "vivid and authorative", The Los Angeles Times honored New Delhi-based writer Pankaj Mishra with the Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction on Sunday.
The book beat Akhil Sharma's Obedient Father and Zadie Smith's White Teeth. Sharma's book is set in New Delhi and Smith's, set in London, has several South Asian immigrant characters. Mishra is 32, Sharma is in his late 20s and Smith is 24.
Mishra's novel, The Romantics, made a splash when it was published by Random House in February 2000. Leaping along the path of critical acclaim hewn by desi novelists like Pulitzer prize winner Jhumpa Lahiri, Mishra's introspective and heady bildungsroman received rave reviews.
"The Romantics establishes Mishra as the author of spare and reflective fiction that is a welcome antidote to the riotous magic realism so common in contemporary Indian writing," The New York Times observed. "Mishra has a wonderful capacity for detail and psychological portraiture..."
The Washington Post also heaped praise on the book. "Most thrillingly, this supple first novel offers continual evidence of the quick intelligence behind it," the paper wrote. Mishra's humanity and emotional clarity are rare in so young a writer."
Although the book did not perform well commercially, on the strength of reviews like these it was republished as a paperback this February by Vintage Anchor. And the Los Angeles Times book prize may finally buoy the new edition onto the bestseller lists. Several desi writers, including Manil Suri, have had bestsellers recently.
Set in Benares, The Romantics follows a young brahmin's quest for self-understanding. Samar is a recent college graduate intoxicated by romantic ideas of the West. Living in the East, he views his own country as an "exotic other" and longs for things Western. It takes a doomed love affair with a French maid, however, to cleanse him of his illusions and reveal the world's true richness.
New Delhi-based Mishra is a freelance book reviewer. In between writing articles for The New York Review of Books, The new Statesman, and the Times Literary Supplement, he is currently editing an anthology of Indian writing.
Hannah Crumpet contributed to this story
EARLIER REPORT:
It's Sharma versus Mishra
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