Life and Times of Mr. S - nicer copy

C.D. Wright: ‘This unique and captivating book takes the experiments of G.V. Desani as a starting point and composes a chronicle of living language enacted around the person of Mr S. Lyric and narrative, parodic and reflective, Vivek Narayanan gives us a work of “woof-confidence” rich with mini-disquisitions on desire, guilt, food, caste, malls, etc. It jiggles the hearticles, slugs back the memory jug, and palavers with a laptop. Often on the heels of a round of elaborate, ebullient passages, the reader is brought to a complete stop: “Only in mind’s stillness shall the wood apple appear.” /// Bhisham Bherwani, Biblio: “[a book of] lyric verse that is experimental and resourceful, embracing a hybrid of formal and avant-garde approaches, and even prose.” /// Eleanor Goodman, Quarterly Conversation: “English may not be an unambivalent tool for [Narayanan], but he wields it like an ironsmith with a blowtorch…” /// Anders Cullhed, Dagens Nyheter: “Narayanan’s poetry snakes like an eel out of most of our conventional approaches to categorize and define the genre of poetry. The first word that comes to me when I try is an English term taken from modern city planning (and which in the noughties began to creep into poetry and criticism): sprawl, sprawl… In [Narayanan’s] poetry… there emerges an intercontinental and post-industrial world… Ultimately the old boundaries between nature and culture are destabilized.” ‘Life and Times of Mr S is a brilliant homage to an ever-morphing language and land.’ /// Adil Jussawalla: "Life and Times of Mr S worked for me like magic. It unsettled my notion of what was real, what possible, and resettled that notion in a strange luminous place. Narayanan uses what he sees as singular illusions -- class, caste, family, for example -- to conjure a 'pluriverse' of his own, crowded with multiple, often polymorphous identities that, by their very nature, could be illusions too. This recalls the work (and play) of magician-acrobats and Narayanan is one of them. Questioning the very nature of reality and the possibility of finding true answers, he pushes at limits, walking a dangerous tightrope. I am dazzled by his dexterity."