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In incandescent prose, award-winning novelist Jeet Thayil tells the story of Newton Francis Xavier, blocked poet, serial seducer of young women, reformed alcoholic (but only just), philosopher, recluse, all-round wild man and India’s greatest living painter. At the age of sixty-six, Xavier, who has been living in New York, is getting ready to return to the land of his birth to stage one final show of his work (accompanied by a mad bacchanal). As we ...
From his debut with Gemini in 1992 to his last volume These Errors Are Correct in 2008, Jeet Thayil has been a provocative and indelible presence in Indian poetry. Collected Poems represents more than three decades of work, starting with poems written in the early 1980s. It includes, for the first time, privately circulated, uncollected poems.
The narrator in these poems abandons the sectarian histories of 1990s’ Bombay for the relative calm of New York, only to find himself a witness to September 11, 2001. In the faux prologue poem ‘About the Author’, he stands ‘on Sixth, watching ruin, with a handful of rain and a prophecy’, a citizen of no country except the republic that gives the book its title. English ...