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Rating: 
Summary: Stunning elegance
Review: Anyone who appreciates the economy and power of the short story form should buy and read this book which is astonishing in its historical, cultural, geographic and stylistic range. Many of the stories, but especially the first two, are an eerie blend of myth and modernity. The reader must speculate on how much they were adaptations from what the author, whose parents are Indian and Irish, read or heard as a child and how much they were creatures of her own wondrously bizarre imagination. Modern stories, except those intended for children, are rarely animistic. These are feistily complex fables for adults who understand the continuum between humans and the rest of the sentient world. "Twang (Release)" has to be one of the zaniest and zenniest titles for a short story (or long, complex dream) ever invented. I found a word I'd never seen before --"marcelled". Are these marshalled waves, or marceauvian waves that mime movement as Vaswani's narrative mimes the crazed logic of fantasy? "The Excrement Man" is as rich in incongruity as the others; the core story is more linear than the first two, although it too has many hallucinatory gambols and gambles. "Sita and Mrs Durbar" is a sad but lovely piece, more manic in subject than style. "Five Objects in Queens" is a suite of vignettes with a common cast, chronological structure, and disconcerting counterpoint -- foreboding continuum under light motifs. I imagine that these Queens stories are more autobiographical than the others, if only for the direct Irish Indian references, but they may be just more miracles of Vaswani's endlessly fertile imagination. "Bing-Chen" offers other ethnically diverse insights, notably the sweet wistful lust of a self-conscious Asian boy who watches prom girls being shorn, before his own hair mixes on the floor with theirs. "Domestication of an Imaginary Goat" is a tour-de-force unraveling of a relationship, interwoven with nostalgic yearning for ways of life lost to political and migratory vagaries. "The Rigors of Dance Lessons" half as long as the other stories in this collection, and even more, well, rigorous, recounts an intense flamenco session, ineptness, disdain and reconciliation. Vaswani's cultural range is especially impressive in another Iberian piece, "Bolero,"which draws together the Basque ethonological landscape and vivid musical metaphors. One could quarrel with Bernstein's equivalency, cited here, between movement and sentence. Why is not the musical movement equivalent to a chapter or to a multi-themed, multiple layered Vaswani story? "The Pelvis Series" takes us into yet other areas of expertise, to paleontology and primate research, and an engaging character, Lola Bonobo, blurring the boundaries of what is human. "An Outline of No Direction" is a clever, telegraphic exercise in subjective geography: four parts follow cardinal directions, disintegrating our vast country; the fifth part is a pebbly reintegration. Vaswani transcends this surface structure with the language and density of reported incident. The last piece "Blue Without Sorrow" is another mysterious migration-and-myth, life-and-death story, marrying (somehow) Mexico and India, peasants and peanuts and literary escapes. This is Neela Vaswani's first book, but her unique voice is already beyond "enormously promising." I can't recommend it highly enough and I just can't wait for her second.
Rating:
Summary: journey to new spaces
Review: Readers who love the short story will enjoy discovering this exciting young writer. The stories have a wide range - magical realism with roots in (East)Indian mythology, funny and realistic depictions of the tensions, misunderstandings, and strong ties within intergenerational Indian immigrant families - but all are almost compulsively readable. The pages fly by, and you will find yourself laughing out loud. Resonant with some of your favorite Indian authors, but an authentically new and hard to categorize American voice.
Rating:
Summary: compelling short story collection
Review: Readers who love the short story will enjoy discovering this exciting young writer. The stories have a wide range - magical realism with roots in (East)Indian mythology, funny and realistic depictions of the tensions, misunderstandings, and strong ties within intergenerational Indian immigrant families - but all are almost compulsively readable. The pages fly by, and you will find yourself laughing out loud. Resonant with some of your favorite Indian authors, but an authentically new and hard to categorize American voice.
Rating:
Summary: journey to new spaces
Review: Vaswani's creative honesty and descriptive genius make these sojourns memorable. Like dreams one cannot forget, the residual allegorical power of the situations you experience linger on long after all the pages have been turned. From stark reality to the fantastic, Vaswani's range touches on various levels of human existence - the mundane to the spiritual. Waiting for more.
Rating:
Summary: Stunning elegance
Review: What separates this book from the pack and makes it a must-read is the multifaceted power of the writing. Vaswani is functioning on a literary level, eschewing easy plotlines and trite constructions, and yet the reader gets soundly pulled into each and every story in the same tidal way children sit rapt at the unfolding of a fable. Vaswani follows the truth of the human heart, regardless of the borders it may cross or the many ways it may find to love.
Many of the stories have land-mine lines or images that--spearing out from the artfully crafted exposition or the colossally detailed exposures of character--bury themselves hilt-deep in the reader: a passing reference to a lumpectomy, an innocent question about the demonic nature of higher education. It is moments like these that had me placing the book back on top of the pile when I was done, ready to read it again almost immediately.
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