Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Unavailable
    Night Theater: A Novel
    Unavailable
    Night Theater: A Novel
    Unavailable
    Night Theater: A Novel
    Ebook207 pages3 hours

    Night Theater: A Novel

    By Vikram Paralkar

    4/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    Listen to the audiobook instead

    About this ebook

  • This debut novel is Jordan Peele meets Carmen Maria Machado, set in rural India
  • A new kind of Indian literature for American readers
  • In meditative, evocative detail, Paralkar offers the story of one unearthly evening, when a physician must confront both his own self-doubt and his skepticism of the supernatural to save the lives of three strangers—only to learn how irreversibly connected his own fate is to theirs
  • Night Theater is a hallucinatory fever dream, a literary ghost story from a talented author ready to break out to a larger audience. It's also a reflection on all-too-real issues, on the power (or lack thereof) we instill in our physicians, and on the profoundly mutable state of life in spaces meant for healing (hospitals, clinics)
  • For fans of Helen Oyeyemi, Samanta Schweblin, Eduardo Halfon, Brian Evenson, or Rivka Galchen, as well as for readers who prefer their fiction haunted with a dash of the surreal or with some destabilizing supernatural elements (like the work of Carmen Maria Machado, Hiromi Kawakami, Italo Calvino, etc.)
  • Paralkar can paint a scene even as he has you tearing through the pages; the clinic and the characters, the family's wounds, and the doctor's instruments are rendered in vivid detail, yet as a reader, you feel the ticking hands of the surgery room clock as sunrise bears down on the murdered family
  • Night Theater explores how class, access, education, and location influence our relationship to medicine: is it magic or science, or some combination of the two? Most rural or low-income communities rely more on the supernatural than the scientific remedies, and why are we so dismissive of the natural remedies science struggles to explain?
  • Paralkar views fiction the way he views medicine: "When a patient comes to a doctor, the latter tries to find out their story, how they ended up this way, and a way to potentially change the future. I think that’s what authors are doing. They’re trying to take some aspect of human beings that puzzles, disquiets, fascinates them, and digging deeper to find out what they can understand. While my writing is a separate endeavour from my medical work and research, there are certain invisible strands connecting the two.” (from an interview in The Hindu, February 2019)
  • The author, an hematologist-oncologist, lives in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and is a U.S. citizen, eligible for national prizes and accolades

    Select Praise From Booksellers

    "A literary page-turner, Paralkar’s Night Theater is an engaging exploration of life, death, and the afterlife. The novel follows a jaded, washed-up surgeon in rural India—understaffed, undersupplied, and overly cynical. Late one night, a young family, recently murdered yet somehow walking and talking, visits his clinic telling the surgeon that they can have a second chance at life only if he is able to repair their wounds that night before they are fully reanimated. What follows is a tautly paced, at turns gruesomely humorous, fable-like novel that almost feels like a wonderfully remixed version of A Christmas Carol or It’s a Wonderful Life but with emergency surgery on the walking dead. Insightful, philosophical, and endlessly readable, I thoroughly enjoyed my time spent in Vikram Paralkar’s dimly lit, roach-infested clinic." —Caleb Masters, Bookmarks (Winston-Salem, NC)

    "What do I really know about surgeons? Only what I’ve picked up from Doctor Strange, profiles of Atul Gawande, and TV medical shows. With that as reference, I would expect a generic surgeon to be egotistical, exactingly meticulous, and contemplative about mortality. Vikram Paralkar uses these archetypal qualities as the building blocks of a rich tale of the limits of human knowledge, skill, and mettle. Told with a remarkable economy, Night Theater takes a supernatural, Gothic premise and plays it out with the kind of calm, procedural manner that is r

    • LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCatapult
    Release dateJan 14, 2020
    ISBN9781948226554
    Author

    Vikram Paralkar

    Vikram Paralkar was born and raised in Mumbai, and now lives in Philadelphia in the United States. He works as a physician-scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, where he treats patients with leukaemia and conducts research into the genetic mutations responsible for the illness.

    Related to Night Theater

    Related ebooks

    Literary Fiction For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Wait Times

      Mar 29, 2021

      Wait Times
      16 min read

    • Article

      Storyteller

      Nov 4, 2021

      Storyteller
      11 min read

    • Article

      A Small Price To Pay

      May 28, 2020

      A Small Price To Pay
      6 min read

    • Article

      A Week In Bedlam

      Dec 9, 2019

      A Week In Bedlam
      13 min read

    • Article

      One In A MILLION!

      Apr 7, 2022

      Sitting in the garden, my imagination was running wild. As bees buzzed in nearby flowers, I took out my pair of binoculars, truly fascinated by the amount of nature in front of me. Coming inside after a few hours of peaceful bliss, my wife Margaret,

      2 min read

    • Article

      A Bug’s Life

      May 19, 2022

      A Bug’s Life
      2 min read

    • Article

      Secrets Of The Seamstress

      Apr 20, 2022

      Secrets Of The Seamstress
      8 min read

    • Article

      A Place of Hope?

      Mar 30, 2024

      A Place of Hope?
      5 min read

    • Article

      Secrets Of The Seamstress

      Apr 20, 2022

      Secrets Of The Seamstress
      8 min read

    • Article

      The Time Traveller Returns

      Oct 29, 2018

      The Time Traveller Returns
      7 min read

    • Article

      GOING TO THE edge

      Sep 3, 2020

      GOING TO THE edge
      7 min read

    • Article

      Divine Diagnosis

      May 26, 2020

      Divine Diagnosis
      3 min read

    • Article

      A Rear Old Time

      May 9, 2021

      A Rear Old Time
      7 min read

    • Article

      Lol

      Dec 20, 2023

      Lol
      3 min read

    • Article

      Lol

      Jun 17, 2020

      Lol
      3 min read

    • Article

      TheBattle For Peace

      Nov 1, 2021

      Hi, I am Alice, welcome to my nightmare. Trouble always finds me. I was one of the one hundred people in this world who had magic running through my veins. I was placed in the school of magic. It was sick! You could learn to brew up good potions for

      4 min read

    • Article

      Pleasure Palace

      Sep 1, 2022

      Pleasure Palace
      15 min read

    • Article

      Barefoot Surgeons

      Feb 15, 2021

      Barefoot Surgeons
      21 min read

    • Article

      Missing Link

      Nov 11, 2021

      Missing Link
      3 min read

    • Article

      Meat is Meat

      Feb 10, 2024

      “Doctor…” “Yes, Captain?” Circling like a typhoon, the captain paced around the catch, her boots crunching on the scattered scales as though on shards of broken crockery. She maintained her distance with a learned suspicion, ready to jerk away should

      15 min read

    • Article

      Hypochondriacs Are Always Right – In The End

      Jan 11, 2023

      This time, it struck me at 4.30am – the halfway mark of a refreshing five-hour sojourn in A&E – I truly mean it. Admittedly, I'd been equally convinced that I meant it on three vaguely similar occasions in the last couple of years. The ultrasound on

      3 min read

    • Article

      Yara And The Witch Queen

      Oct 1, 2019

      I knew the dangers of witchcraft. My parents had told me about the time before I was born, when magic plagued our desert kingdom of Bahati. Untrained witch doctors trying to cure warts ended up paralyzing their patients or turning them into crocodile

      10 min read

    • Article

      Always On Duty

      Oct 5, 2022

      We have all been in a restaurant when you hear the crash of a tray. This is almost always followed by a muted cheer. It all sounded the same in a small-town hotel restaurant in Argentina a few years ago, but the crash wasn’t a tray and it proved quit

      4 min read

    • Article

      When Life Bites

      Sep 14, 2020

      When Life Bites
      6 min read

    Reviews for Night Theater

    4/5

    59 ratings8 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 4/5
      A bitter, misanthropic doctor, exiled in disgrace to a government-run clinic in a small village, deals with a corrupt and frustrating bureaucracy both in this world and in the afterlife. Very bleak and existential, with a glimmer of hope, but nowhere near the bright ending of “a greater understanding of life's miracles” that the book description led me to believe.
    • 2/5
      This was for my reading group and TG it was short. I have no idea what it was about or what it was attempting to do. It's just bizarre. I would classify this as magical realism and I am just not a fan.Other people in the group seemed to enjoy it a lot more than me, although I was not the only one who was HUH?
    • 4/5
      Very compelling story of an embittered cynical Indian surgeon who was falsely accused of substandard care and bribery and forced out of his city academic job. He works in a poor village clinic for several years dealing with terrible working conditions and poverty then one night a murdered dead family arrives begging him to operate on their wounds before dawn to save them. At dawn their blood will return and without surgical repair of their wounds, they will die again and return to the afterlife (depicted like purgatory). In a riveting macabre scene, the surgeon repairs their dead cadaver like bodies. The end is surprising, bittersweet but tinged with hope. Not an uplifting tale, but well written and fascinating.
    • 5/5
      4.5 stars. After taking a while to get started, this scathing critique of bureaucracy and paean to the power of human compassion had me completely. Too short though, I want to know more about the mechanics of the afterlife!
    • 1/5
      We didn’t read it . It came up on it’s on and interrupted the book I was listening to.
    • 5/5
      In a run-down clinic at the outskirts of a rural Indian village, a once-successful surgeon is bringing what remains of his career to an unassuming end. Saheb, as the villagers respectfully call him, tries to do his job decently, despite lack of facilities, a sorely limited budget, stifling bureaucracy and institutionalised corruption. As for assistance, he must make do with an untrained pharmacist and her handyman husband. But he is soon to face his biggest challenge yet. One night, a young family – father, pregnant mother and infant son – present themselves at the clinic, suffering from horrific injuries inflicted by a band of bandits. It was a savage attack and no one could possibly survive the wounds they show the doctor. In fact, the would-be patients are dead, allowed to return to Earth by a friendly official of the afterlife. There’s one problem though – at dawn, blood will once again course through their veins. In the course of one long night, the doctor must successfully complete three complex surgeries, not to save the living, but to resurrect the dead.

      The dead tend to haunt ghost stories and horror fiction. Vikram Paralkar’s Night Theatre (originally published in India as The Wounds of the Dead) is neither of the two. Its horrors, if any, lie in the detailed surgical descriptions (Paralkar is a hematologist-oncologist and, presumably, speaks from experience) and in the quasi-existential sense of futility instilled by the evident moral failure of society. If pressed to classify the novel, I would describe it as a work of magical realism. Indeed, despite its fantastical premise, it feels strangely plausible, its plot driven forward by an inherent logic. By a happy irony, Paralkar manages to use a surreal tale as a vehicle for social critique. At the same time, the otherworldly elements provide a springboard for ruminations about death and the meaning of life.

      I must say that the book’s blurb intrigued me, but little did I expect to discover a little literary gem. By turns tragic, darkly comic and ultimately moving, I thoroughly enjoyed this novel and can’t recommend it enough.
    • 2/5
      A man, his wife, and their son show up at the very underfunded clinic run by a surgeon and a helper. They have wounds, but surprise, they're not bleeding, because they're dead! Walking, talking, dead. Sounds interesting, right? The author is a physician himself, and I suspect this book came to be because he had some philosophical thoughts about life and decided to craft a novel around them. If you removed the meandering thought exercises and fable-like stories, this 208 page, simply written book would probably become novella length. Other than the surgeon, none of the characters even have names, and the story feels similarly distant. It has a simple plot and very little character development. It's not engaging and the interesting premise is the best part of this book despite not being executed particularly well.
    • 4/5
      "The day the dead visited the surgeon, the air in his clinic was laced with formaldehyde."A doctor works in an isolated and decrepit village clinic in India, assisted by a young woman known as the Pharmacist. One evening, a man, his very pregnant wife, and their young son arrive at the clinic. The doctor sees that they have been brutally wounded, the wife beneath the scarf around her neck has been nearly decapitated, yet there is no blood. The tell the doctor a strange tale of their having been murdered, and miraculously in the afterlife having been given a second chance. They have been returned to the world, and if the doctor can repair their wounds before dawn they will be allowed to live again. As the doctor works through the night, we learn the stories of the doctor and of the family he is trying to save.Despite its somewhat mystical premise, this is a realistic and powerful novel. Told in a simple, straight-forward, even scientific manner, it nevertheless raises philosophical and moral issues, and moves us to an ambiguous ending. I loved it.4 stars