An impressively crafted set of short stories, thoughtful and poetic.
Sudhakar’s collection of short stories melancholically reflects on loneliness, loss, and cultural decay.
The author here assembles nine short stories that are largely set in India and united tonally by an atmosphere of elegiac forlornness, a painful sense of all that is lost in shifting time. In the lead story, “Come Tomorrow,” Diya struggles with the recent death of her grandmother and her abandonment as a child by her mother. Now a professional photographer, she must come to grips with her mother’s absence and with her strange connection to her—her mother ran away with an artist, she learns. In “Empires Have Been Destroyed,” Ana runs an illegal speakeasy in her apartment in Bandra during the prohibition years, a “place that was not supposed to exist.” After Ana dismisses her bouncer Dinesh for an impropriety while in the company of her daughter Mari, Dinesh becomes deathly ill, accuses Ana of witchcraft, and instigates a police raid of her home that doesn’t turn up a scintilla of credible evidence. In both stories, the historical context suggests a culture in disrepair, especially considering parental responsibility—Mari’s father was an incorrigible alcoholic. “Marigolds,” the most experimental and haunting tale in this affecting collection, is written in the second person and artfully creates the unsettling illusion that the reader is being treated to a story about themself. “So yes, you crave the company of others. For sounds beyond the drafts whistling and howling through the house, its foundations audibly sinking and creaking beneath you. For a house made of something other than wind, which carries nothing you can hold.” The unnamed protagonist lives with her mother Gita “alone at the edge of the world” in a quiet redoubt by the sea. The protagonist finds a portal to another city by a different sea, and when she returns, she is all but unrecognizable to her mother. Sudhakar masterfully creates a mood in which anything feels possible, where magic lurks behind the quotidian. This assemblage of short fiction is emotionally enthralling and literarily inventive.
An impressively crafted set of short stories, thoughtful and poetic.Pub Date: Dec. 16, 2024
ISBN: 9781574419498
Page Count: 224
Publisher: University of North Texas Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 19, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.
A falsely accused Black man goes into hiding in this masterful novella by Wright (1908-1960), finally published in full.
Written in 1941 and '42, between Wright’s classics Native Son and Black Boy, this short novel concerns Fred Daniels, a modest laborer who’s arrested by police officers and bullied into signing a false confession that he killed the residents of a house near where he was working. In a brief unsupervised moment, he escapes through a manhole and goes into hiding in a sewer. A series of allegorical, surrealistic set pieces ensues as Fred explores the nether reaches of a church, a real estate firm, and a jewelry store. Each stop is an opportunity for Wright to explore themes of hope, greed, and exploitation; the real estate firm, Wright notes, “collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in rent from poor colored folks.” But Fred’s deepening existential crisis and growing distance from society keep the scenes from feeling like potted commentaries. As he wallpapers his underground warren with cash, mocking and invalidating the currency, he registers a surrealistic but engrossing protest against divisive social norms. The novel, rejected by Wright’s publisher, has only appeared as a substantially truncated short story until now, without the opening setup and with a different ending. Wright's take on racial injustice seems to have unsettled his publisher: A note reveals that an editor found reading about Fred’s treatment by the police “unbearable.” That may explain why Wright, in an essay included here, says its focus on race is “rather muted,” emphasizing broader existential themes. Regardless, as an afterword by Wright’s grandson Malcolm attests, the story now serves as an allegory both of Wright (he moved to France, an “exile beyond the reach of Jim Crow and American bigotry”) and American life. Today, it resonates deeply as a story about race and the struggle to envision a different, better world.
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.Pub Date: April 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-59853-676-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Library of America
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2021
BOOK TO SCREEN
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
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