Serious Men
ABOUT
THE BOOK
A poignant, bitingly funny Indian satire and love story set in a scientific institute and in Mumbai’s humid tenements. Ayyan Mani will not be constrained by Indian traditions. Despite working at the Institute of Theory and Research in Mumbai as the lowly personal assistant to a brilliant but insufferable astronomer, he dreams of more for himself and his family. Ever wily and ambitious, Ayyan weaves two plots: the first to cheer up his weary, soap-opera-addicted wife by creating outrageous fictions around their ten-year-old son; the other to sabotage the married director by using his boss’s seeming romance with the institute’s first female—and very attractive—researcher. Meanwhile, as the institute’s Brahmins wage a vicious war over theories about alien life, Ayyan sees his deceptions intertwining and setting in motion a series of extraordinary events he cannot stop. Unfailingly funny and irreverent, Serious Men is at once a hilarious portrayal of runaway egos and ambitions and a moving portrait of love and its strange workings. (From Publisher).
NOMINATING LIBRARY COMMENTS
This novel is that rare thing; a wonderful satirical novel that isn’t peopled by caricatures and grotesques. It contains, for example, a study of a married couple in late middle-age, rendered with such sharpness and tenderness and subtlety that the reader, even as he laughs, doesn’t feel that age is being played for laughs. A novel that makes laugh-out-loud comedy out of the rivalries and hobby-horses of theoretical physicists is remarkable enough, one that combines this with a savagely plausible send up of snobbery and hierarchy in metropolitan India today must be exceptional. Serious Men achieves its effect in brilliant, consistently surprising prose. It’s as if Michael Frayn’s The Tin Men had been re-written by Salman Rushdie.