The Monkey Grammarian

Written while the Nobel Prize–winning author was the Mexican ambassador to India, this is a dazzling mind-journey to the temple city of Galta, "a sumptuous feast of visual imagery" (SFChronicle). Hanuman, the red-faced monkey god and ninth grammarian of Hindu mythology, is the protagonist, offering an occasion for Octavio Paz to explore the nature of time and reality, fixity and decay, and the question whether language and grammar are god-given, or an invention of man with powers borrowed from the divine realm?