Tag: #shortstory

Book Review: Darkness by Bharati Mukherjee

As it appears in the New York Journal of Books

The 12, starkly realistic and fully realized short stories in Bharati Mukherjee’s Darkness incrementally tell of Indian immigrants reconciling an opportunity to make a fresh, upwardly mobile start with the hard knocks of being a stranger in a strange land. The characters’ inherent faith, cultural, and social mores are weighed against new frontiers in their search for footing. Their struggles concern what to maintain and what to shed in the face of family loyalty, racism, and ingrained tradition. In the interest of a bright future, the characters divest themselves of religious doctrine and caste systems that don’t migrate. They persevere in the search for identity as they chisel their way in a land of promise. In braving to push boundaries, they are made aware of their limits.  

In this updated collection of classic short stories, the universally lauded Bharati Mukherjee writes in her 1992 author introduction, “I have joined imaginative forces with an anonymous, driven underclass of semi-assimilated Indians with sentimental attachments to a distant homeland but no real desire for permanent return.”

The characters in Darkness are of all ages and represent the immigrant experience from multiple points of view. Some are in arranged marriages, some are single, and some are divorced. The short stories portray characters in different settings. They differ in gender, background, faith, and occupation. Each impactful story is predicated on what it means to be a fish out of water.

In “The Imaginary Assassin,” a first-generation American tells of her family lore that

led from a dusty, Ludhiana village to Yuba City California. “The plan had been for grandfather to slip into the illegal alien’s underground at the end of the visit, make a fortune, then bring in the rest of his family.” The narrator confesses that as an adolescent, “The shabby diligence of our immigrant lives in Yuba City shamed the romantic in me,” but one night, her grandfather sets her imagination ablaze by recounting a fantastic tale—in a mixture of Punjabi and English—of his involvement in the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi.

A memory of the divided nation between Hindus and Muslims sets the stage for “The Lady From Lucknow.” Nafeesa Hafeez, the Indian narrator now living in Atlanta, compares her ill-fated, extramarital affair with an America to a long ago scandal in Lucknow, which she can’t help but use as a frame of reference when her affair is exposed. Hafeez concludes, “I have lived a life perched on the edge of ripeness and decay. The traveler feels at home everywhere because she is never at home anywhere.”  

Immigrating to Canada has its complex challenges. In “The World According to Hsu,” it is said of half Indian and half Czechoslovakian freelance journalist, Ratna Clayton, “In Montreal she was merely English, a grim joke on generations of British segregationists . . . In Toronto, she was not Canadian, not even Indian. She was something called, after the imported idiom of London, a Paki. And for Paki’s, Toronto was hell.” On holiday with her Canadian husband, on an island off the coast of Africa, in the middle of a revolution, Ratna navigates the locals who try to place her nationality. Mukherjee writes in laser-sharp language devoid of emotion when Ratna, in a restaurant full of fellow travelers, pours herself a glass of wine, “feeling for the moment at home in that collection of Indians and Europeans babbling in English and remembered dialects. No matter where she lived, she would never feel so at home again.”   

That this powerful collection of timeless short stories is now back in print with Godine Nonpareil imprint is a gift to benefit Mukherjee devotees and new readers alike. Such literary luminaries as Amy Tan, Robert Olen Butler, and Joyce Carol Oates have written glowing endorsements of Indian American Canadian Bharati Mukherjee’s body of work, and this collection exemplifies the reason. Mukherjee lays bare the method behind her magic, when she writes fitting words for this collection in Darkness’s introduction: “For a writer, energy is aggression: urgency colliding with confidence. Suddenly, everything is possible. Excluded worlds are opened, secretive characters reveal themselves. The writing-self is somehow united with the universe.”

For readers, writers, immigrants, patriots, and expatriates the world over, Darkness by Bharati Mukherjee is a study in excellence of a short story’s highest achievement.

Bharati Mukherjee was an Indian American-Canadian writer and professor emerita in the department of English at the University of California, Berkeley. She was the author of a number of novels and short story collections, as well as works of nonfiction.

Sharp as a Serpent’s Tooth by Mandy Haynes.

In Mandy Haynes’s collection of Southern tinged short stories, Sharp as a Serpent’s Tooth, characters are as different as Jayhawks and Starlings, they grin like possums, and, if in need while in someone’s bad graces, are told they can go get what they want “their own dang self.” Throughout the assembly of Haynes’s five, compelling stories, her character-intensive narrative is urgent and breathless, so regionally pitch-perfect as to feel indiscreet:

“Now don’t roll your eyes at me,” the narrator of short story, Junebug Fischer says. “You know dang good and well Rita’s daughter did not get pregnant on her honeymoon. And you know same as me that she shouldn’t have married that no count Tucker, pregnant or not.”

Sharp as a Serpent’s Tooth is laser-sharp, finely wrought fiction in each stand alone story. In “Eva,” the abused daughter of a con-artist preacher is depicted with such Southern Gothic surrealism as to make her seem other-worldly. In “Plans for Sweet Lorraine,” a fearlessly headstrong mother is led by gut-intuition to rescue her innocent daughter from the clutches of a smooth-talking charlatan posing as a man of God.

In each story, the narrator’s voice is chock full of gumption– the sure-footed kind grown and fostered in the hollows of the rural South. They are all unique, memorable narrators. In “The Day I threw the Rock,” the young, red-haired narrator prefers to go barefoot in overalls, in whose pocket she keeps a garden snake as she unfurls the high-drama of events that lead to her throwing the eponymous rock. In “Cussing Snakes and Candy Cigarettes,” a young girl defies common, local opinion of her dead mother’s twin sister, in an eye-opening summer that impacts her coming of age.

Author Mandy Haynes approaches her craft with an uncanny grasp on pace in perfect measure. Her authentic voice is beyond comparison. Her high-stakes stories are layered with utter unpredictability. I cannot recommend this Southern to the core collection of short stories emphatically enough. Each of the five stories in Sharp as a Serpent’s Tooth is the perfect combination of riveting story and character as place.

Mandy Haynes has spent hours on barstools, at backstage venues, and riding in vans listening to some of the best songwriters and storytellers in Nashville, Tennessee. She now lives in Fernandina Beach, Florida with her three dogs, one turtle, and a grateful liver. Her first collection, Walking the Wrong Way Home was a finalist for the Tartt Fiction Award, and selected as a bonus pick for The Pulpwood Queens’ 2020 Reading List.

About me – Mandy Haynes, author of literary fiction with a southern drawl

Mandy Haynes’s Blog http://www.the runawaywriter.com

Gather at the River: 25 Authors on Fishing ( Edited by David Joy with Erick Rickstad)

At the heart of every well-beloved novel is that one riveting scene that verges on transcendence and stays in the reader’s memory as the very soul of the book. Gather at the River is a collection of those resonant moments, one right after another, and there’s not a weak story in the assembly. I use the word story, instead of essay, on purpose. These are first person accounts rife with insider’s knowledge in the hands of those that know nuance and how to describe it down to the last rock in the river. These writers know what from the woods as they recount their individual fishing stories and gift the reader with their own version of universal nostalgia. They work the depths of the seemingly simple themes of family connections, childhood innocence, and pivotal moments all within a bucolic setting that expands the visceral margins of character as place. You can see, hear, and feel the mood of every setting, and though fishing is the common premise, the central experience in each is so much more. There’s such art in the craft of a briefly told story. The sure sign of success is when the reader, in this case, yours truly, is so moved by the reading experience that they wish for more.