Rana Dasgupta
Rana Dasgupta (b. 1971) was born in Cantebury, England. He grew up in Cambridge, England and studied French literature at Balliol College, Oxford and media studies at the University of Wisconsin.
In 2001, he moved to New Delhi as living in England was too expensive and found a job with a public relations firm. But after signing a contract to write the book in 2002, he gave up his job and settled down full-time to write his debut novel.
Rana Dasgupta believes in the tradition of story-telling, a central aspect of his novel Tokyo Cancelled, which has been received well by reviewers. They have called his book a modern-day Canterbury Tales.
He lives in New Delhi.
Works
Tokyo Cancelled
Tokyo Cancelled is a modern-day saga about a group of thirteen passengers who are snowed in and stuck at an airport with their connections to other parts of the world unable to land. The narration takes place in the contemporary setting of an airport terminal. When snowstorms ground their flight to Tokyo, the thirteen passengers experience a moment of hiatus in their lives. Stranded beside the baggage carousels in an echoing arrivals hall for a single night, they huddle up, passing around packets of peanuts and cigarettes until one of them suggests that “when you are together like this stories are what is required”. And so the night is passed.
About the stories themselves there is nothing simple. Rich, strange, they leave trails that criss-cross the globe like a flight map. A tailor sews a robe of surpassing beauty for an ungrateful prince; a Japanese entrepreneur risks all when he falls helplessly in love with a doll; Robert De Niro’s lovechild explores the magical properties of a packet of Oreos; in a Paris gripped by plague, an immortal changeling is touched by death. The stories are thematically linked, but discrete; the characters and setting of the framing device, meanwhile, are accorded minimal space.