The scene that won over the judges was the climax of an orgy that apparently reached across space and time, and involved the book’s three main characters: Jaz, a young gay Muslim, Karun, a missing physicist, and Sarita, his wife.
“Surely supernovas explode that instant, somewhere, in some galaxy. The hut vanishes, and with it the sea and the sands -- only Karun's body, locked with mine, remains. We streak like superheroes past suns and solar systems, we dive through shoals of quarks and atomic nuclei. In celebration of our breakthrough fourth star, statisticians the world over rejoice.”
Manil Suri lives in America where he works as a professor of mathematics at the University of Maryland. “City of Devi” is Suri's third work of fiction. He won the Barnes & Noble Discover Prize in 2002, has been shortlisted for the Pen/Faulkner Award and longlisted for the Man Booker Prize.
Suri faced some stiff competition for the prize, which singles out “the crude, badly written, often perfunctory" sexual descriptions in fiction.
Susan Choi wrote in My Education, "I seemed to come right away, with a hard, popping effervescence, as if her mouth had raised blisters, or an uppermost froth; but beneath, magma still heaved and groaned and was yearning to fling itself into the air."
Eric Reinhardt wrote in The Victoria System, "The zip of her skirt sputtered between her fingernails like a motorboat on a waveless sea ... My erection beat time in my underwear."
The awards were announced on Tuesday at a ceremony at the aptly named In & Out Club in St James's Square, with four hundred guests in attendance. Suri could not attend and the award was accepted by a representative of his UK publisher.
[Literary Review]
