C.D. Wright: ‘This unique and captivating book takes the experiments of G.V. Desani as a starting point and composes a chronicle of living language enacted around the person of Mr S. Lyric and narrative, parodic and reflective, Vivek Narayanan gives us a work of “woof-confidence” rich with mini-disquisitions on desire, guilt, food, caste, malls, etc. It jiggles the hearticles, slugs back the memory jug, and palavers with a laptop. Often on the heels of a round of elaborate, ebullient passages, the reader is brought to a complete stop: “Only in mind’s stillness shall the wood apple appear.” ‘Life and Times of Mr S is a brilliant homage to an ever-morphing language and land.’
Adil Jussawalla: "Life and Times of Mr S worked for me like magic. It unsettled my notion of what was real, what possible, and resettled that notion in a strange luminous place. Narayanan uses what he sees as singular illusions -- class, caste, family, for example -- to conjure a 'pluriverse' of his own, crowded with multiple, often polymorphous identities that, by their very nature, could be illusions too. This recalls the work (and play) of magician-acrobats and Narayanan is one of them. Questioning the very nature of reality and the possibility of finding true answers, he pushes at limits, walking a dangerous tightrope. I am dazzled by his dexterity."
Bhisham Bherwani, Biblio: “[a book of] lyric verse that is experimental and resourceful, embracing a hybrid of formal and avant-garde approaches, and even prose.”
Eleanor Goodman, Quarterly Conversation: “English may not be an unambivalent tool for [Narayanan], but he wields it like an ironsmith with a blowtorch…”
Anders Cullhed, Dagens Nyheter: recently wrote, “Narayanan’s poetry snakes like an eel out of most of our conventional approaches to categorize and define the genre of poetry. The first word that comes to me when I try is an English term taken from modern city planning (and which in the noughties began to creep into poetry and criticism): sprawl, sprawl… In [Narayanan’s] poetry… there emerges an intercontinental and post-industrial world… Ultimately the old boundaries between nature and culture are destabilized.”