A Review of Rishi Reddi's Karma and Other Stories

[sa-am.livejournal.com]

A Review of Karma and Other Stories by Rishi Reddi.

This short story collection is the first one I’ve read in a long time that I’d actually consider teaching in place of Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies, so I’m really quite happy that I spent the time stay up until 3 a.m. reading it.

The stories are often linked together in that a peripheral character in one story might appear in another. Because of this approach, I tend to think of this collection as more of a short-story cycle, or even a veiled novel. If one were to think about the arc of the novel then, I would suppose that it moves from stories of immigration to stories of childhood, a sort of reverse chronology that makes for an interesting trajectory. The first story, “Justice Shiva Ram Murthy,” investigates the arrival of the titular character to the United States. His son, Sameer Murthy, has recently gotten married to a woman named Supriya. The story is hilarious because Shiva, as narrator, wants the readers to believe that he’s a perfectly fine gentleman in sync with acculturating to the United States when everything about the story tells us otherwise. The second story, my favorite, “Lakshmi and the Librarian,” explores the ennui experienced by Lakshi Chundi in her decades long marriage, a marriage that is then put in peril by her friendship with the local librarian, Elias Filan. The third story, “The Validity of Love,” takes minor characters from both the first and second stories and unites them in a story of two divergent second generation Indian American women, Lata (who appeared in story #2) and Priya (who appeared in story #1) and considers how one navigates relationships in the face of strict parental expectation. The fourth story, “Bangles,” takes a minor character from story #2 (Rukmini) and places her in conversation with an elderly woman, Arundhati, who has just traveled to the U.S. to live with her son and daughter-in-law. This story most reminded me of Thrity Umrigar’s If Today Be Sweet, but there was something about the density of the narrative itself that even in its short twenty or so pages made it much more compelling for me as the reader. The title refers to the jewelry that the elderly grandmother possesses and the link it gives her to a more distinguished past, one that collapses in the face of her children and grandchildren’s changes in the United States. Losing this bearing signals a traumatic reversal and a desire to return back home. I really enjoyed tracking how these characters appear again and it resulted in a complex web that reminded me of a Robert Altman film. A dancer at the wedding that occurs in story #3 appears as the focal point of “Devadasi,” in which the main character, Uma, travels to India as to learn a traditional Indian dance from a famed instructor, who just happens to have married a Muslim man. This religious difference does pose one of the greater thematic unities across the stories as characters must marry not only within religion, but within caste (Hindu).

All the stories are for the more or less set or linked to Boston, Massachusetts. The volume I received contains a nice little snippet written by the author herself that explains the reasoning for her setting the stories there. Another linkage is that most of the characters speak Telugu, which is language found primarily in Indian province of Andhra Pradesh; it is apparently the third most spoken language after Hindi and Bengali. I found that I couldn’t really set this short story collection down and it does provide complex and intricate figurations of characters both young and old, living in the United States, or traveling to India, and mostly, the understatement that I found so intriguing occurs all throughout the collection.

One of the most poignant stories, “Karma,” discusses the disintegration in the relationship of two brothers. The conclusion with its unwillingness to give more than a snippet of what the future portends encapsulates the general formalistic tone of the collection. A first rate read and one of the best I’ve read this year.

Comments

[pylduck.livejournal.com]

Yay Arthur Golden blurbed the book! I'm going to pick up this book for "fun reading."

[sa-am.livejournal.com]

sarcasm does not become you

[pylduck.livejournal.com]

BITE MY SHINY METAL ASS.

[sa-am.livejournal.com]

!

wow, you seriously do treat me as if i'm your doormat don't you?

[pylduck.livejournal.com]

Well, I treat you like something else that I probably shouldn't mention in polite company. :P It's cuz I love you! Ha ha.

[thebowlerhat.livejournal.com]

This sounds great. I'm intrigued by the linking of characters through the different stories. I'll definitely have to keep this one in mind for when I have time to read more fiction.

[sa-am.livejournal.com]

definitely a keeper... pretty sure you'd enjoy it =)