Dubious honor for his novel ‘The City of Devi’.
By Deepak Chitnis
WASHINGTON, DC: Maryland-based mathematician and author Manil Suri has won the Bad Sex in Fiction Award, a dubious distinction given out annually to an author whose novel contains a badly written passage involving sexual intercourse.
Suri won the award for his third and latest novel, “The City of Devi,” which details the lives of a small group of characters in Mumbai as the city goes into a lock-down in the midst of an imminent nuclear threat. At one point in the novel, some of the characters engage in an orgy, which Suri sets against the backdrop of a nuclear winter. As he writes it:
“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.”
Suri’s book came to the attention of Literary Review, a 34 year-old British literary magazine that started the Bad Sex in Fiction Award in 1993 to “draw attention to the crude, tasteless, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel, and to discourage it.”
In winning the award, Suri beat out fellow nominees Susan Choi (for the novel “My Education”), Woody Guthrie (for the posthumously released novel “House of Earth”), William Nicholson (for the novel “Motherland”), and five others. He also joins previous winners Sebastian Faulks, Norman Mailer, and fellow Indian Anniruddha Bahal, who won in 2003 for his novel “Bunker 13.”
Suri is no stranger to award recognition, but he’s usually singled out for positive notices. His 2001 debut novel, “The Death of Vishnu,” was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize that year, and was short-listed for the 2002 PEN/Faulkner Award. In 2008, he published his second novel, “The Age of Shiva.”
The son of Bollywood music director R.L. Suri, he attended the University of Bombay before coming to Carnegie Mellon University and earned his Ph.D. in mathematics in 1983. He is currently a professor of mathematics at the University of Maryland.
The award was given out by British actress and author Joan Collins at a ceremony at the In & Out Club in London. Suri was unable to attend, but representatives of his publisher, Bloomsbury, accepted the award on his behalf.