Good Afternoon everyone and welcome to another edition of The Avid Reader. Today our guest is Vikram Paralkar author of Night Theater, his second novel the first was Afflictions. Night Theater was published in January by Catapault.

Vikram is a physician-scientist at the University of Pennsylvania. He treats patients with leukemia and researches the disease and the nature and manner in which normal cells develop and how and why they sometimes turn cancerous. And how a specific type of RNA regulates genes.

Night Theater is my kind of book. Vikram and I share the same love of Borges, Calvino and Nabokov and I am sure, and I will ask him, whether he also is as much in love with Marquez.

In Night Theater a book of magical realism, a doctor drawn in part from Vikram’s profession is portrayed as a man who is irritating and irritable, who is gruff but good, who is thrown into circumstances not of his making both in the real world and the magical world that Vikram creates, in whole cloth, for us in the macabre setting he visualizes.…

Because our unnamed protagonist (actually all of the characters are unnamed) is thrust into unusual and unpleasant circumstances, he lives a live of unpleasantness and one in which he hopes (presumably) for release.

Then he is thrust once again into one night of horror, deceit, testing and a kind of resolution.

The reader is in thrall and also confused and wondering (which is the best kind of book) throughout the narrative and even after the book is put down and the reader walks away still pondering, perhaps for a lifetime, what has happened in the book and in his or her own life.

So Vikram welcome and thanks for joining us today.