"Very funny," said Kurt Vonnegut of this bestselling Indian novel in which Vijay Prabhu grows up Catholic in a young India and somehow gets hooked onto an American Dream.
The novel takes off shortly after the puzzling onset of puberty propels Vijay into a search for Knowledge and Understanding, which leads to Bertrand Russell, Saul Bellow, steamy American paperbacks and success books. Inspired by new ideas, Vijay overcomes his religious brainwashing and decides to become a successful writer and lover of women. This ambitious plan runs into obstacles when, for the next six years, his cherry proves amazingly resistant to repeated assaults, yielding only at Age 22 to a Nepali doctor of love (a PhD in Love).
The result is A Confederacy of Dunces and David Copperfield meeting Catcher in the Rye and Portnoy's Complaint. This comic novel of childhood, coming of age, of modern Indian manhood, and an American Dream was described as "humorous and manic" by The Independent of London, and as "personifying "the post-Independence Indian male" by Masala Magazine. This political, literary, subversive, irreverent, and anti-colonialist novel has been widely published, and also been adapted for the stage and played to many standing room only audiences. It has been published in Austria (German Edition), the Czech Republic, Italy, Latvia, Hebrew, and in other languages and editions, in some cases under a pen name.
Coming of Age, Indian novel, Contemporary India, Indian society, the Male Experience, the Male Mind, Sexual Repression, Indian Christians, Comic Novel, Indian Comic Novel, Politically Incorrect Indian Novel, Men and Women, American Dream, Immigrant American Writers, Secular Humanism, God and Religion.
