These provocative tales suggest that fiction illuminates truths beyond the reach of journalism.
Adiga follows up his Man Booker Prize–winning debut (The White Tiger, 2008) with a collection of interconnected stories about the village of Kittur in southwestern India.
The title refers to the period between the assassinations of Indira Gandhi in 1984 and Rajiv Gandhi in 1991, though there isn’t much evidence of chronological progression here. The outside world seldom intrudes on Kittur, yet the tensions of caste and the conflicts of religion course through the narrative, sparking comedy and tragedy—sometimes both at once. The text is structured as a week’s walking tour of the village; italicized sections describing buildings and landmarks precede the stories of various characters. Among the protagonists are an ambitious delivery carrier, a workman who oversteps his bounds and a lower-caste schoolboy who sets off an explosion in chemistry class to avenge the mockery he has endured. One of the strongest pieces features a renowned journalist who has become disenchanted with his profession. “Even the writer of the truth should not know the truth entire,” he thinks. “Every true word, upon being written, is like the full moon, and daily it wanes, and then passes entirely into obscurity. That is the way of all things.” The often-poetic tone recalls fairy tales and folk parables, as poor people in particular come to terms with the way of all things, foremost among them that “the rich own the whole world.” Toward the end, Adiga introduces a character who could be confused with his creator, a writer praised as a young man because he has “gone into the countryside, and seen life there, unlike 90 percent of our writers.” Returning 25 years later, he falls in love with a much younger woman and realizes how much of an outsider he is: “he had become the stock figure whom he had worked into several of his stories—the lecherous old Brahmin, preying on an innocent girl of a lower caste.”
These provocative tales suggest that fiction illuminates truths beyond the reach of journalism.Pub Date: June 9, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4391-5292-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2009
For all the portentous metaphors (keys and locks appear in every story) and all the convoluted and fabulist narrations,...
These nine casually interlocking stories, set in a familiar yet surreal contemporary world, overflow with the cerebral humor and fantastical plots that readers have come to expect from Oyeyemi (Boy Snow Bird, 2014).
The opener, "Books and Roses," sets the tone: stories within stories and a fittingly cockeyed view of Gaudi’s architecture as two women in Barcelona share their experiences in abandonment while searching for the loved ones who left them behind. Most of the volume takes place in England, with nods toward Eastern Europe. In " 'Sorry' Doesn’t Sweeten Her Tea," weight-loss clinician Anton becomes increasingly involved in raising his boyfriend’s two adolescent daughters, Aisha and Dayang, while fishsitting for a traveling friend. The story seems straightforward until Anton’s friend falls in long-distance love with a mystery woman who's entered his locked house without a key and Anton’s co-worker Tyche helps Aisha recover from a crisis in disillusionment by casting a spell from the Greek goddess Hecate. Tyche returns as a student puppeteer in "Is Your Blood as Red as This?," which layers creepy echoes of Pinocchio onto realistically genuine adolescent sexual confusion. Readers realize Tyche’s fellow students Radha and Myrna have ended up sexually happy-ever-after when they pop up in "Presence" to lend their shared apartment to a psychologist so she and her grief-counselor husband can carry out the ironically eponymous science-fiction experiment that forces the psychologist to accept the absences in her life. While Aisha appears as a filmmaker employing puppets in "Freddy Barrandov Checks…In?," Dayang stars as ingénue in "A Brief History of the Homely Wench Society," a post-feminist romantic comedy about warring men's and women’s societies at Cambridge. Several stories are pure fairy tale, like "Dornicka and the St. Martin’s Day Goose," a twisted take on "Little Red Riding Hood,” and "Drownings," in which good intentions defeat a murderous tyrant.
For all the portentous metaphors (keys and locks appear in every story) and all the convoluted and fabulist narrations, Oyeyemi’s stories are often cheerfully sentimental.Pub Date: March 8, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-59463-463-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2016
Gutsy stories from one of our most fearless writers.
Characters from the fringes of society grapple with desire and fury in this collection of short stories.
Early on in “The Pull,” a story about a young swimmer from a war-torn country, the narrator describes her childhood as the “kind of story that makes your chest grow tight as you listen.” The stories here are exactly that kind: insistently visceral, pushing into, and past, the reader’s comfort zone. Many of the stories center erotic experiences. In “The Garden of Earthly Delights,” Bosch works in a modern-day fish processing plant, and he finds boundless pleasure in the arms of a young male co-worker. In “Cusp,” a teenage girl smuggles drugs into a local prison and shares her body with the prisoners as a way of being closer to her incarcerated brother. But if these stories teach us about lust, they also flip to the other side of that same coin: These are narratives full of deep rage. Some of this rage takes place inside of intimate relationships, as in “A Woman Signifying,” in which the protagonist deliberately burns her face against a radiator to create a “symbol” of her anger at her lover. Sometimes this rage is social, as in “Drive Through,” about an encounter with a panhandler at a McDonald’s drive-thru. Yuknavitch (The Misfit’s Manifesto, 2017, etc.) keeps readers’ heads pressed against what is hardest to see, and this doesn’t always land. Some of the rage can feel self-righteous; some of the desire pushes deep into taboo and veers toward unpalatable. But where there are risks, there are rewards, and these howls from the throats of women, queer characters, the impoverished, and the addicted remind us of the beauty and pain of our shared humanity.
Gutsy stories from one of our most fearless writers.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-525-53487-7
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
