THE MODERN MAN

Parihar explores the lives of modern men in this short story collection.

In “The Face,” one of five stories in this collection, a beautiful man is so enthralled by his own reflection that he forgets to eat or drink. In “The Host,” guests arrive for a party and destroy a house without realizing the host isn’t even there. In “A Pianist,” a piano player struggles with his identity after the Nazis cut off his fingers at Auschwitz. In “The Daughter of Comradeji,” the longest and most complex story in this volume, a woman named Seema contemplates how life might have been different if her late nephew, Timu, were still alive. Timu’s untimely death upset the balance of power in the family: Seema is in an unhappy arranged marriage and has come to resent her powerful father-in-law, who plans to pass his fortune on to her husband’s cruel older brother. This narrative is a little hard to follow and is less successful than the others in the collection—it might have worked better if expanded into a longer story. In “The Modern Man,” a man contemplates what, exactly, makes a modern man as he goes through the motions of a fairly mundane day. Most of the pieces touch on nature and natural beauty, providing contrast to the grind of contemporary life—the theme is a little underexplored, but it pops up as a motif in several of the stories (“The butterfly which came last night died on the Guava tree”). The florid and evocative prose is striking, but it veers into the purple in spots. Some passages are also difficult to read (especially the scenes that take place at Auschwitz in “A Pianist,” described in great detail), and the language is often quite vulgar. Ultimately, each of the stories is a morality tale, working economically (except for “The Daughter of Comradeji”) to deliver a punch, as good short stories should do.

A fascinating selection of short fiction.